Love Me (34 page)

And Gabby. That betrayal hurt as badly as if not worse than Harry’s. Amanda had thought Gabby Preston was her friend, someone she could rely on if things went bad. Gabby had welcomed her into her home, held her, patted her back while she cried, listened patiently to every raw detail of her heartbreak.

And Gabby knew all along. She knew all the time it was all her fault, and she never told me
.

It was too much to bear.

Olive would take her in, sure. Amanda might even squeeze some more money out of her. But blackmail wouldn’t work forever. Frankly, she’d been lucky to get away with what she had, before Olive realized Amanda couldn’t very well compromise Diana without ruining herself. Besides, pretty soon, Diana’s career would recover so much as to make her untouchable. And then Olive’s hospitality would come with a price. Olive might pay her debts, but she’d see that Amanda paid her back, with considerable interest. “You can work it off,” Olive would say, and Amanda would have no choice but to start back at the bottom of the ladder, seeing the men none of the other girls would. Men with cold voices and frightening desires who thought a fifty-dollar powder room tip didn’t have nearly as favorable an effect on a girl as an unyielding pair of fists.

And when enough months had passed that Amanda’s condition became apparent, the doctor would be summoned. Some bloodstained sheets, a few shed tears, and Amanda’s “complication,”
as Olive liked to call it, would be decidedly less complex. She could be back to work in five days; hell, Lucy had been back on the job in three. And the entire cost of the operation, including pain medication and ruined linen, could easily be added to Amanda’s tab.

I could say no
, Amanda thought.
I could tell her I won’t go through with it
.

And she’d be back out on the street before she even finished talking. Back to the fear, the hunger, and loneliness. The terrible loneliness that penetrated her more deeply than any cold night’s wind could. The knowledge that nobody wanted her, nobody loved her, nobody cared if she was alive or dead.

“I’m alone,” Amanda said to no one. “I’m all alone.”

The marble tiles of the bathroom floor were cold against her bare shoulder. Shivering, she heaved herself up off the floor and crossed to the big picture window overlooking the street.
When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window
. That was something she’d heard Margo say, although she dimly remembered hearing it before in some whitewashed clapboard prairie church a million lifetimes ago. Could this be the window he meant?
Norma Mae Gustafson
. Born in a hayloft in Arrowhead Falls, died on the pavement of Park Avenue beneath the open window of the penthouse suite in the Waldorf Astoria. In its own way, it was quite an ascent.

And quite a fall
.

As mechanically as though she’d been hypnotized, Amanda undid the latch and pushed open the window. Could she really do it? The night breeze felt cool and inviting against her flushed face. The streetlamps made the pavement shimmer, like moonlight on a mountain lake.
It would be just like diving into
a clear pool
, Amanda thought. One little jump and it would all disappear. The stacks of unpaid bills, the creditors and the threats. The nightmares of the heavy thud of drunken footfalls on the ladder to her hayloft. The dreams of being in Harry’s arms, and the fresh, searing pain when she woke up to find he wasn’t there.

Amanda looked around the sumptuous room, at the canopied bed she would never sleep in, at the glossy boxes of dresses she would never wear. She placed her hands on her stomach. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the child she would never meet, who would never be born. “It’s better this way.”

Slowly, she slid her leg over the windowsill.

And then there was a knock at the door.

Her first impulse was to laugh at the absurdity of it. To have a visitor at a time like this! But the knocking grew louder and more persistent, and for reasons Amanda would never quite be able to explain to herself, she found it impossible to ignore.
Maybe God doesn’t open a window. Maybe when he closes a door, he just needs you to open it again
.

“Red!” Eddie Sharp’s tuxedo was just disheveled enough to hint that he’d seen some real mischief that night and was looking to find some more. “They told me downstairs you were in. Thought I’d pop up and see if you were in the mood for a quick nightcap.…” The grin faded from his face as he got a glimpse of hers. “Holy hell, honey, what’s the matter? You look like you’ve just lost your best pal.”

“Eddie.” Amanda looked up at him through lashes thick with tears. His eyes were dark and trusting.
Like Harry’s used to be
. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Anything, Red. Anything.”

“Say you loved a girl. Really loved her with your heart and soul. And then you found out she had … a past. There had been other men in her life. Quite a few men.”

“If I really loved her with my heart and soul, it wouldn’t matter the least little bit.”

“Say it was worse than that.” Amanda dropped her eyes to the floor. “Say … say she was a … a good-time girl. Then what?”

Eddie’s voice dropped low, as quiet and final as the grave. “Well, then I guess she’d know how to show me a good time.”

Letting out a cry, Amanda threw herself into Eddie’s arms. She felt his astonishment, a tiny moment of hesitation, and then they closed around her, blocking out everything else. The danger had passed. Her mouth was on his, devouring it hungrily, and she took sustenance from a warmth, an ardor that quickly rose to meet her own.
Safe
, her heart cried out to itself over and over again.
This will keep me safe
.

In that moment, it wasn’t Eddie Sharp she was kissing. It was life itself.

F
or once, Hollywood was in total agreement: it was the wedding of the year. Maybe even the century.

That is, they agreed as soon as they recovered their powers of speech. Then everyone in the movie colony was buzzing with all the romantic details, the sheer juiciness of which seemed to elevate the newlyweds to a level that neither had ever achieved on their own. About how it was love at first sight, eyes meeting across a crowded room—in this case, the crowded room of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, although the groom claimed he’d known she was the girl for him the moment she had briefly appeared in the doorway of the greenroom as he prepared to go onstage at this year’s Governor’s Ball. About how their mutual passion had been so strong that he’d paid a delighted cabbie five hundred dollars to drive them to Atlantic City in the middle of the night, where they could get married at one of those twenty-four-hour
chapels without a blood test and with two down-on-their-luck poker players as witnesses. About how the bride arrived in a jaw-dropping black tulle evening gown with an unusually daring neckline that
Photoplay
claimed was “the thing that hooked her man,” although she changed for the ceremony into a demure suit of ruched ivory silk with a matching veiled hat. Both ensembles were rumored to be Hattie Carnegie, although when reached for comment, the couturier would only say: “Miss Farraday makes her clothes her own.” The House of Mainbocher, long associated with the famously chic starlet, offered no official statement from Paris, but as a representative in their Bullock’s Wilshire boutique told
Reelplay
, “Mrs. Sharp is a cherished client and we look forward to providing her with many exquisite pieces for her new married life.”

“I’ve never been so happy,” said the radiant bride. “Eddie is everything I’ve dreamed of in a husband, and I’m determined to make him the perfect wife.”

The dazed and grinning groom said simply, “I feel like the luckiest guy on earth.”

At Metro, Paramount, and Warner Brothers, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Bette Davis were all lobbying to star in pictures based on the Farraday/Sharp nuptials—the public frenzy over the elopement would surely translate into big box office, which all three stars could use.

Larry Julius was said to be fuming at having somehow been ignored despite his near-sacred jurisdiction over such matters, but ever sensitive to public opinion, he and his staff composed a statement for Olympus chief Leo Karp that was so brimming with “love conquers all” beneficence and fatherly pride in his wayward charges that it could have come from the desk of Walt
Disney himself. Every other flack and studio chief in town, however, was in raptures that the Omniscient One had finally been beaten—and by a girl he’d fired. Surely this was a sign that the tide was turning. Old Man Karp was slipping.

Margo Sterling, whose Wedding of the Year had just had the rug yanked cruelly out from under it—by one of her own bridesmaids, no less!—was diplomatic, but everyone knew the studio was going to make her postpone until she could win back the attention of the public. If Diana Chesterfield didn’t win back the groom first.

The only comment from Harry Gordon, the bride’s former flame, in whose company she’d been seen the night of her marriage by no less a reliable source than the legendary Walter Winchell, was a retort the editor of
Picture Palace
deemed unprintable in a family magazine.

From Gabby Preston, who had been seen keeping company with the groom during the past few weeks, there was no statement, printable or no, on the record or off. This was because just before the story broke to the press, a team of Larry Julius’s goons arrived at the house on Fountain Avenue and, over Viola Preston’s protests, cut the line to the phone.

It was just as well, really
, Gabby thought as she snorted up another one of her crushed green pills from the dashboard of her mother’s car.

After all, if they called now, what was Viola going to say? That the day it was announced that her underage daughter’s bad-boy boyfriend had eloped with another woman, Gabby had stolen the Cadillac and driven off to parts unknown without so much as a word of explanation—or a license? The gossip rags would have a field day with that one.

But it’s not like I had any choice
, Gabby thought, swerving abruptly into the next lane. Angry honks went up from the car she’d just cut off, but she sped on heedlessly, barely noticing. She could run every automobile in Los Angeles off the road right now, and she wouldn’t care. Gabby was a woman on a mission. The second she’d seen that blurry photograph of the man she thought she loved tenderly lifting the bridal veil of the girl she thought was her best friend, Gabby knew there was only one person she could talk to, only one person who would understand, who would be able to explain just what the hell was going on.
Only one person who might actually be my friend
.

She knew the only place to find him, too.

And there was no way in hell any studio chauffeur was going to take her there.

The famously rollicking sidewalk outside the Dunbar Hotel was almost eerily deserted by day. Gabby heard an ugly metallic crunch as she pulled the Cadillac up against the curb, but she didn’t jump out to survey the damage.
There’ll be plenty of time for that later
. Instead, she picked up the last bit of powder from the polished walnut dashboard with a moistened fingertip and rubbed it over her gums.
No sense in it going to waste
. But that made her heart race, so she swallowed one of the blue pills she had tucked into the glove compartment.
Two greens, one blue
, she thought, although today the magic ratio had been more like ten to three.

Or thirty to ten. She couldn’t remember anymore. To be safe, she swallowed another blue pill.
Just to even things out
.

The slightly shabby lobby of the Dunbar was nearly as empty as the sidewalk. In the main dining room, where the musicians played, a couple of waiters were pulling the café chairs down
from the tables. A janitor stripped to his undershirt, his suspenders dangling around his hips, was clenching an unlit cigar between his teeth as he ruminatively pushed a broom across the stage. Another man stood behind the bar in his shirtsleeves, carefully slicing citrus fruit with a small paring knife. He looked up at Gabby with an expression that might have been surprise if he weren’t the kind of guy who had long ago made up his mind never to be surprised by anything.

“We ain’t open yet,” he said to her gruffly, still sawing away at the rind of a particularly recalcitrant lime. “Unless you’re a guest of the hotel.”

“And if I am?”

From the set of the bartender’s mouth, he seemed to find this possibility highly unlikely. “Then you can go back up to the front desk and ask one of the porters to bring you a bottle of whatever you want.”

“Actually, I’m looking for someone,” Gabby said.

“Oh.” His tone invited no further elaboration.

“Yes. A friend of mine.”

“A friend of yours? Here?” Chuckling, the bartender shook his head. “Missy, I think you got the wrong place.”

He can’t give me the brush-off. Not now. Not after everything I’ve been through
. “Dexter Harrington,” she pressed. “He plays here sometimes.”

The man’s head jerked up from his lime. “Dexter Harrington?”