Silent Murders (20 page)

Now I’m usually pretty quick on the uptake, as you might expect after a lifetime coping with stage catastrophes. I’ve improvised my way through a theater curtain catching fire, a drunk barging into our act, Darcy Darling throwing up in the middle of a song, magic tricks that went amiss, and a minor earthquake, but for some reason, David rattled my composure. I could only blanch at the talk of babies—that certainly wasn’t in my script. And I didn’t like losing control of the script.

But it melted dour old Mrs. Patterson. David’s endearing smile was worth the price of admission, and that farmboy manner of his would charm a snake. Producing a skeleton key from her pocket, the woman led the way to the rear of the complex and up the stairs.

“The police told me that no one saw any visitors to Lorna’s on Sunday. I thought that mighty odd, but now I understand. With all these bushes, someone could come and go without being noticed.”

She nodded. “Over there’s the passageway to the parking lot, so a body could come through there, walk along here, and go upstairs without another soul laying eyes on him. We’ve always felt the privacy was an asset, but now some of the residents are wondering if we shouldn’t cut back the shrubbery.”

She unlocked the door and stood aside as David took my hand and led me in. “Take your time,” she said. “Come get me when you leave. If you need boxes, I have a few.”

I burst into tears.

“Excuse my wife, Mrs. Patterson. This has been hard on her. She’s normally not so emotional but what with Lorna’s death and the new baby on the way, well…”

The what?

“I understand completely,” she said, closing the door as she left us.

“You do that crying stuff pretty well,” said David. “I’ll have to remember that.”

I rounded on him. “Dammit, David, what was that ‘our babies’ stuff? And I don’t look pregnant!”

He shrugged. “I just thought it up. Kinda liked the way it sounded.” He smiled disarmingly. I felt like clobbering him with my handbag but he moved out of range and flicked on an overhead light. “Let’s get to work. What exactly are we looking for?”

Curbing my exasperation, I told him. “Any clue to Lorna’s real name or family. You start in here.” I indicated the living room and adjacent dining room with a sweep of my hand. Lorna had lived in fine style. The jade-green color of the sculpted Chinese rugs repeated in the drapes and in the scatter pillows on the white upholstery, giving an impression of cool sophistication that was marred only by the wilted flowers and drooping greenery. The apartment was scrupulously clean, but I suspected no one had been in here since the day of her death. “The detectives have been over the place, but I was told that the only thing they found was a bank book. Maybe we’ll be luckier. Look through her desk for letters. Check any books to see if she wrote her name in them, or if there is an inscription, like ‘To Betsy from Mother.’ Go through the closet for names in her coats or hats and scraps of paper in her pockets. See if there are any keys with tags or grips with travel labels on them. I’ll do the same in the bedroom.”

Lorna had liked green. Her bedroom suite was done in a cool lime with yellow and orange accents that reminded me of the citrus groves that made this part of California famous. Everything was in pristine condition, seemingly new and untouched. Sterile. It gave me the creeps.

I rifled through a closet full of expensive clothes, drawers packed with lacey unmentionables, and a vanity, learning only that Lorna McCall had never felt the need, as Lottie did, to mark her stuff with her initials. On her bedside table sat an alarm clock, a pair of glittery earrings, and a glass of water. I went through the cabinets in the bathroom where she had drowned, hoping to find an old prescription bottle with her real name on it. Lots of pills, no names.

“Any luck?” David leaned against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets.

I sighed and shook my head. “You?”

“A few recent postcards. I laid them on the desk for you. The usual bills. I checked the kitchen, too. Threw out all the spoiled stuff in the icebox and emptied the drip pan.”

“All right, I’m done in here. Now let’s switch and see if either of us missed anything.”

Twenty minutes’ searching confirmed what I already knew about David Carr—he was a man who missed very little. I found nothing in the living room, dining room, or kitchen that hinted of Lorna’s personality, let alone told me anything about her past or her real name.

Dejected, I stood in the center of the living room and made a slow circle. No framed photographs on the walls, no snapshots on the bookshelves. No books on the bookshelves, for that matter, and no magazines or newspapers … seems our Lorna wasn’t a reader. A few china knickknacks that looked new. A green glass bowl that might have been a gift. A silver cigarette holder full of Chesterfields. Mirrors on the walls where others would have hung paintings. More stage set than home. In fact, I’d seen hotel rooms with more personality.
Where in this soulless room was Lorna?
It was almost as if she had deliberately erased her past from her present.

I closed my eyes and listened hard, trying to absorb what the room was saying. Little by little, I drew the room inside me, trying to picture Lorna at the table, on the sofa, in the bedroom, trying to soak up the emotions Lorna had left behind. The clues were there, tucked in the edges of awareness, hiding in the shadows.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. Ollie ollie oxen free!

That’s when I realized that the absence of information
was
the clue. In fact, I knew more about the girl who called herself Lorna McCall than anyone in Hollywood.

I opened my eyes to find David watching me from the doorway to the bedroom, his head cocked to one side, standing still as stone. As I blinked back into myself, he came forward. “Where’ve you been?” he asked gently.

“I was … thinking.”

“For almost ten minutes.”

“Was it that long? Seemed like a few seconds. Did you find anything in her bedroom?”

“Nope. How ’bout you?”

“Yes … that is, no, but I know now why no one knew much about Lorna. She had run away from home and was making sure no one would ever find her. She suffered horribly growing up—beatings, rape, violence, maybe all of those. She didn’t have much education, but she was uncommonly pretty, and that was her ticket out. She took nothing with her when she left except whatever money she could get her hands on and worked her way to Hollywood where her looks could buy her a new life. Liquor and dope dulled the memories. Sex bought affection.” I looked around the sterile room once again.

“Did you get all this out of some sort of vision?”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t a vision. I just
understood
. I’ve known a few girls like Lorna in vaudeville and burlesque. Mostly burlesque. And there are more working in every brothel in every town. Their stories are much of a sameness.”

“What, now?”

“Now? Now we leave. There’s nothing else to learn here. No one’s going to trace Lorna’s background, not now, not ever. She made sure of that.”

An hour later, I was back at the studio taking notes on a scene that had just been completed. Frank kept us working late that night on an indoor sequence. I got home hungry and tired, made myself a tomato sandwich for supper, and went straight to bed. That night I dreamed I was an actress playing opposite Rudolph Valentino in
Cobra,
and when we paused between takes, Henabery’s script girl was bringing me a second cup of coffee.

25

“Don’t be nervous; you’ll do fine,” I assured Myrna at the breakfast table the following morning. “Have some Cream of Wheat. You’ll need something on your stomach.”

“You sound like my mom.”

“Mother knows best. It may be a long while before they let you break for lunch. I am surprised, by the way, that the filming started so quickly.”

“Actually, they started a week ago, before the Io part had been cast. Geez, I hope I’m good enough.…”

“You’re talented, agreeable, and hardworking. Trust me, they’ll like you. There are so many prima donnas out there—so many like Lottie Pickford—that a girl like you will be a pleasure to work with.”

“You think so? What’s Lottie do that irritates people so much?”

I sighed. Where to start? “For one thing, she’s often late, and that’s inexcusable. Anyone else would be fired, but a Pickford? Untouchable. So don’t be late. Allow some extra time in the mornings in case the buses are delayed. And she drinks so much she’s usually hungover the next day, so she constantly has to take breaks for headache powders, coffee, water, bathroom visits, and so forth. And she thinks she knows more than the professionals and quarrels with them about how her costumes look, how she should be made up, how she should be lighted, and which camera angles are best.”

“I wouldn’t dare argue with those people. I don’t know anything.”

“You’ll do great. I can’t wait to hear about it when you get home tonight.”

I wasn’t following my own advice that morning about arriving late to work. I took last night’s dream for a warning and decided to make a stop at Paramount Studios before reporting to my own set. If I left the house early enough, I could get to Paramount, see Henabery’s script girl, and arrive only a little tardy at Pickford-Fairbanks. I knew Douglas had told Frank Richardson and Pauline Cox that I would be doing some work for him during the day, and neither one had said a word to me about my frequent absences, but I didn’t want to seem to take advantage of the situation.

Two guards were working Paramount’s main gate, and a short line had formed. When my turn came, I gave my name and asked to see Sylvie Baxter for a few moments. The guard spoke on the telephone and told me to wait. Miss Baxter was on her way.

She strode up a short time later, dressed in a chic brown suit with a mannish cut, her clipboard under one arm and a pencil behind her ear. She remembered me from Tuesday morning.

“What can I do for you, Miss Beckett?” Her voice was short, not curt, but all business—a far cry from the weepy young woman I’d seen after the poisonings. Her polite tone of voice clearly indicated she had no time to waste. I made a mental note to cultivate that manner in the future. It seemed admirably professional.

“It’s Jessie, please. Thank you for seeing me. I’m grateful for your time and won’t take much of it. Douglas Fairbanks sent me to ask you a few questions about the poisoned coffee. When I saw you on Tuesday, you said that you were on your way to get a second cup of coffee for Mr. Valentino.”

If she was surprised at my mission, her face didn’t show it. No doubt she had long since ceased to wonder at the unusual demands stars and directors made on their underlings. “That’s correct.”

“Had you brought him his first cup?”

“No.”

“Do you know when he had his first cup?”

“No.” She thought a moment, and added, “But it was at least an hour before that, since we had been filming without a break for that long.”

“I see. Did Paul Corrigan have a part in
Cobra
?”

“No.”

“In any Paramount picture?”

“No.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Someone told the police he had come to pay a call on Faye Gordon in her dressing room. He had been logged in a half hour earlier.”

Considering that Paul Corrigan had spent hours the previous night in her company, the early-morning visit seemed peculiar. He and Faye had barely spoken at Pickfair … in truth, Paul hadn’t spoken to anyone after his sudden freeze at the dinner table. He had shared a sofa with me during the film, and when I made an attempt at polite conversation, he was so lost in thought, he didn’t hear a word I said. He must have remembered something urgent to tell Faye, something that came to him after the dinner party was over.

“Do you know anyone else in the studio who had coffee after Mr. Valentino?”

She shook her head. “The police asked us that, too. I don’t think there was a satisfactory answer. They asked everyone to remember what time they had coffee. No one remembered. I had coffee, but I couldn’t tell you what time. We were very busy, as always. It isn’t something you think about, normally.”

“But only people working on the
Cobra
set would have been helping themselves to that pot of coffee?”

“Not necessarily. Anyone passing through, a grip from another film or a secretary from the office, would have been welcome to help themselves. It’s impossible to say.”

And anyone passing through could have poisoned the coffeepot.

I returned to Pickford-Fairbanks, swapping the outdoor fragrance of pepper tree perfume for the studio scents of fresh-cut wood and wet paint, and reported to the
Son of Zorro
office. A glance at the schedule told me we’d be working that morning on a simple scene that was set in Don Q’s chambers with his two loyal servants, Robledo and Lola. I hurried to the correct set, where I saw Charles Stevens, the actor playing Robledo, talking with the director. Charles was already dressed in his doublet and trousers. The dismay on his face was as plain as his makeup.

“… so sorry, but we’ll have to postpone it,” Frank Richardson was saying. “I’m going back to the cantina since it’s already set up next door.” Catching a glimpse of me, he said, “Jessie will telephone you if we can shoot your scene tomorrow.”

Charles threw me a furious look I knew wasn’t meant for me. “Sorry, Charles,” I sympathized as I whipped out my notepad and jotted down his number, Madison-0799.

“Yeah, yeah, me, too. Just shoot me if I ever accept a part in another film with Lottie Pickford.”

“Lottie?”

“Didn’t you hear what Frank said? You must have come in after he made the announcement. Lottie is sick today.” He mimicked her voice. “
I’m just too sick to come in, Fraaaank
. Sick, my eye. Hangover’s more like it. That dame would be a lot healthier if she’d quit boozing all night long!” And he muttered his way to the dressing room.

When I caught up with Frank, he and Douglas Fairbanks were engaged in earnest conversation. I hovered at the edge of the stage so as not to interrupt, but Douglas saw me and motioned me over.