Love Me (35 page)

“Yes. The piano player. Although he plays a little bit of everything, I guess. Do you know him?”

The bartender put down his knife. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I mean, sure. Sure I do.”

“Well?” Gabby tapped her foot impatiently. “Is he going to be here tonight? Or do you know where I can find him?”

“Now, that I don’t know. What does a girl like you want with Dexter Harrington?”

“What do you mean?”

The man’s eyes flashed. “I mean, I aim to mind my own business, that’s what I mean. So I ain’t about to go running my mouth about Dex to just anyone. Least of all some little girl who, no offense, looks like she’s going to be nothing but trouble. So I tell you what. You want to find Dexter? Why don’t you write a note and I’ll make sure he gets it. That way he can decide for himself whether he wants to be found or not.”

Write a note?
The mental image of this man watching her as she struggled to force a pencil to form the right letters sent a shudder of alarm through Gabby. “You don’t understand,” she insisted. “Dexter’s my friend. He’ll want to see me. He’ll be angry that you wouldn’t tell me where to find him.”

Desperately, she scanned the room, a trapped mouse looking for a way out. A small stream of light shot through one of the shuttered windows and fell on a waiter setting up chairs, illuminating an unexpected reddish tinge to his close-cropped hair. “Him!” Gabby exclaimed. “I know him! I mean, he knows me.”

“Rusty! Come here for a minute.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“This …” The man paused for a moment, studying Gabby. “This lady says you know her.”

Rusty looked alarmed. “I … I don’t rightly know.”

“Sure you do!” Gabby exclaimed, extending a hand toward
him. “I’m Gabby Preston. Eddie’s … Eddie Sharp’s friend, remember?”

“Eddie Sharp’s friend.” His voice was mechanical, but a faint flicker of sympathy touched his eyes. “Sure. How you doing?”

“Oh, I’m fine.” Her voice was artificially bright. “Just fine. Positively fine.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it.” Wiping his hands awkwardly on the short apron he wore, he glanced anxiously back at the tables. “Now, is there something I can do for you, or …”

“As a matter of fact, there—”

“She wants to know where Dexter is,” the bartender interrupted.

“Dexter Harrington?” Rusty whistled. “What the hell does she want with Dexter Harrington?”

“I’m right
here
,” Gabby reminded them. “I can hear you. And I only want to talk to him.”
Would tears help?
she wondered, looking from Rusty to the bartender and back again. “It’s just that … with everything that’s happened, I just … I need to talk to someone. Someone who might … understand.”

And suddenly, without quite meaning to, Gabby Preston began to cry. The first tears she’d shed since the whole sordid mess of Eddie and Amanda came to light, and they weren’t the winsome, pearly ones she’d been taught to let drop slowly down her cheeks by Olympus’s most skillful acting coaches, the sort she’d always imagined might inspire the tenderest sympathy from all who saw them. This wasn’t so much crying as awful, body-racking sobbing, the kind that made the tears pour down her face in torrents, disfiguring her features and leaving horrible streaks of Max Factor cake mascara behind.

Silently, the bartender poured a jigger of whiskey and pushed
it toward Gabby. She gulped it down gratefully and slid the empty glass forward for a refill.

“There, there,” Rusty was saying. “It can’t be that bad. Eddie didn’t get you into any … any trouble, did he?”

“No.” Gabby shook her head, surprised to note that she was perversely flattered by the assumption.

“And Dexter?” Rusty asked carefully. “Did Dexter …”

“Aw, come on,” the bartender snorted. “Dexter Harrington’s got more sense than to fool with some little white girl.”

“Dexter was always a perfect gentleman,” Gabby insisted, trying to keep from slurring her words. The whiskey had made her awfully sleepy. She’d have to dip into her emergency stash of green pills for the drive home.
If I go home
. “I just wanted to talk to him, honest. Do you think he’ll be here later?”

Rusty let out a slow hiss, like an ominously deflating tire. “Here? No. Not for quite a while. You see, Dexter’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean gone?”

“I mean, he’s gone. All I know is he and that cat Eddie Sharp had some kind of falling-out. About what I don’t know, although my guess is some chick. It’s always some chick. Anyway, last I heard, he packed up and went back to Paris.”

“Paris? Paris, France?”

“Far as I know, he ain’t never been to Paris, Texas. He left a couple of weeks ago. Right before Eddie went off to play that gig in New York.”

“But I saw Eddie right around then. He never said anything.”

“Well, he wouldn’t, would he? Like I said, it was a bit of a sore subject.”

“He can’t be in Paris,” Gabby said flatly. “He just can’t. There’s going to be a war. Everyone says so.”

“Yeah, well, you got me there.” Rusty laughed. “Guess Dex figured he rather take his chances with Adolf Hitler than Eddie Sharp.”

Gabby’s hands were shaking. Dexter was gone. Eddie was gone. Amanda had betrayed her.
Nobody loves me
. The thought seared through her, as direct and final as a bullet through the brain.
Nobody wants me. Nobody cares if I live or die
.

“Give me a drink,” she ordered the bartender.

“I just gave you two, and you ain’t paid yet for either one.”

With difficulty, Gabby undid the clasp of her purse and pulled out a crumpled ten-dollar bill. “That should take care of those and then some. So come on, fill ’er up. Unless you got something stronger behind that bar of yours.”

The bartender froze, whiskey bottle in midair. “Stronger?”

“That’s right. Whatever you have.”

The bartender’s eyes flashed dangerously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on, sure you do.”

“And I’m sure I don’t.”

“My God, do I have to spell it out for you?” Gabby yelled, lunging for the whiskey in his hand. “I’m looking for
dope
. Smack. Happy dust.
Anything
. Anything guys like you keep behind the bar so girls like me never have to feel anything they don’t want to.”

The bartender slammed down the whiskey bottle. “Get the hell out of my bar.”

“
What?
What did you say?”

“You heard me. Get the hell out of here, before I throw you out.”

“How … how
dare
you?” Gabby sputtered. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“Believe me, sister, I know exactly who you are, and that’s why I want you the hell out. Last thing I need is some junked-up Hollywood princess pulling a croak on my watch. So go on, get yourself gone before I call in someone to do it for you.”

Rusty took her arm gently. “Come on, Miss Preston. You’re not feeling well. I’ll put you in a cab.”

“Get your hands off me!” Gabby shrieked, jerking away from him as though he’d burned her. “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!”

She managed to snatch the bottle of whiskey from the bar before she was lifted aloft by a pair of massive arms—belonging to some previously unseen bouncer, it seemed—carried through the lobby, and dumped unceremoniously onto the sidewalk, where a small but curious crowd, lured by her screams, had begun to gather.
Great
, Gabby thought irritably.
Now everyone shows up
.

A man with a leering mouthful of gold teeth sidled up to her. “You lookin’ to score, baby?”

Before Gabby could respond, she spied the telltale gleam of a camera lens in the crowd, leaving her no choice but to leap into Viola’s Cadillac and peel away from the curb like a hit man fleeing the scene of a crime. In the relative safety and privacy of the speeding car, Gabby lunged for the glove compartment and emptied the remaining contents of both glass vials down her throat, washing the pills down with generous gulps of revoltingly warm whiskey. Blue, green, the ratio of each to each, what did it matter anymore? She’d have to swallow an entire pharmacy to make a damn’s worth of difference now.

The scenery was changing fast.
Amazing how quickly you can move when you decide to let the traffic make way for you instead of the other way around
, Gabby thought, taking another swig from the purloined whiskey bottle.
Maybe everything in L.A. really does take twenty minutes
. Already she could see the Hollywood sign looming before her like the gates of heaven. Or was it hell? Gabby wasn’t sure anymore. She thought she saw Eddie’s face as she came up Laurel Avenue and turned onto Sunset Boulevard. It was looming over the hills, smiling, beckoning to her. Then it changed to Dexter’s face. Then Amanda’s. Then some horrible amalgamation of the three.

“Please,” Gabby said. “Please just hold still so I can talk to you for a minute. That’s all I want, to talk to you.”

What she didn’t see was the other car. But she heard it. A sickening crunch of crumpling metal and shattering glass. The sound of everything bad in the world. The sound, Gabby thought, of death.

“Oh please,” Gabby whispered. “Oh please, oh please, oh please.”

She didn’t know who she was talking to, or what response she expected. Dazed, she reached for the handle and forced the door open. In front of her was the crushed exoskeleton of what looked to have once been quite a nice car, bearing about as much resemblance to its former state as an exhumed corpse to a healthy human.

On a dashboard as littered with sparkling glass shards as any flashbulb-strewn red carpet, Gabby glimpsed a hank of yellow hair darkened with quickly congealing blood.

“Oh God,” she gasped. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

But if anyone was going to listen to her now, it certainly
wasn’t God. Shaking, Gabby staggered to the pay phone on the corner and dialed the number she’d been instructed to remember as though it were her own name.

“Larry Julius’s office.”

“This is Gabby Preston.” There was something warm and wet trickling down her face, filling her mouth with the taste of hot metal.

“Gabby, yes? Is anything wrong?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. Please help me. Oh please, oh please, oh please.”

Then the receiver slipped from her hand as everything went dark.

T
here was something peculiarly heartless about the weather in Southern California.

Sure, it was mostly wonderful to live in a place where it was blue-skied and beautiful all the time. But on the morning of Helen Frobisher’s funeral, when one might wish for just a tastefully cinematic touch of melancholy rain, the relentlessly cheery sunshine felt like a stinging rebuke.
Look as solemn as you want in your black dress and heavy veil
, the dazzling rays seem to say to Margo.
We know it’s all an act
.

It had been Larry Julius—appropriately enough, Margo thought, given the fact that he’d been the Pied Piper who’d led her away to this enchanted land in the first place—who had delivered the news that her mother was dead. “Car accident,” he’d said brusquely, thrusting a handkerchief preemptively into her hand. “Some maniac was speeding around the curve on
Franklin and Sunset. Ran her off the road. She lost control and wrapped her car around a pole.”

Margo twisted the monogrammed linen uselessly around her fingers. Her eyes were dry. “Did she … I mean, was it …?”

“Instant?” Larry shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was the impact, maybe she had a heart attack when it happened. All I know is that by the time the ambulance got there, it was too late.” His voice softened. “Do you really want to find out? If you do, I can try to get permission for an autopsy. Your father seems dead set against it, but if it’s important to you …”

“No. What does it matter now? She’s dead. Dead is dead.”

“Duchess.” Larry looked down at the hat he was twirling in his hands. “I know this must be hard on you. I’m awfully sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“Nonsense. I’m glad it was you. No one else would have been so direct. After all, there was hardly any love lost between my mother and me. What use would it be to pretend?”

She held the crumpled handkerchief back out to Larry. He held up his hands. “Keep it. These things have a way of hitting you when you least expect it. I’ve seen you without a hanky when disaster strikes, and believe me, it’s not a pretty sight.” Sighing, he put his hat back on and adjusted the brim. “What I don’t get is what the hell someone like your old lady was doing on Sunset Boulevard in the first place.”

She was coming to see me
. The message Margo had left with Emmeline that night had finally done the trick. After more than a year of total silence—and more afternoons than Margo could count spent sitting on the stools at Schwab’s with her back to the door, waiting for the familiar click of footsteps that had never come—Helen Frobisher finally had something to say.
Whether their meeting was to have been a touching reconciliation or the final nail in the coffin of their estrangement, Margo would never know, but in her last moments, her mother had been thinking of her.

Margo wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse.