Twisted Boulevard Page 14

  Not long after the confrontation with Breen, Oliver had pulled a disappearing act. Marcus wasn’t sure the two events were related, but he suspected they might be. Breen had seemed pretty determined to save Oliver from Marcus’ sinful clutches. Marcus confessed he didn’t want to believe that Breen had convinced Oliver he could take better care of him than Marcus could, but Oliver was in no shape to think straight, so maybe?

  Marcus changed the subject and asked Gwendolyn about Ignacio Zaparelli, whose name had been slipping into her conversations lately. Was romance rearing its soft, fluffy head? Gwendolyn laughed and admitted that Zap had a certain electric charisma about him, but he was at least ten years too young for her.

  What she didn’t admit was how Zap was one of those guys who added up to a sum much greater than his parts. His thick, dark eyebrows could do with a judicious plucking. His blue eyes were penetrating and he knew it, but his mouth fell naturally into an unfortunate droop. Those dimples helped, but one was bigger than the other, which gave his face a lopsidedness that worked better than it should have. At the end of the day, none of it mattered much, because the man’s innate charm blurred his physical shortcomings. He filled any room just by entering it.

  Marcus asked, “Did you pay any attention to your locks?”

  After she’d noticed her back door had been tampered with, she got a locksmith to install a second one. She’d felt more secure, but now wondered if she’d been fooling herself. “What about them?”

  “I didn’t see any signs of forced entry. So either they had the key—”

  “I never even got around to giving my landlord the extra one.”

  “Maybe they got in some other way?” He jacked a thumb in the direction of a metal ladder bolted to the rear wall. “Where does that go?”

  Gwendolyn squinted at the ceiling. Most of the lighting was centered over the workbench. She could just make out a rectangular line. “Is that a trapdoor?”

  Marcus grabbed one of the rungs.

  She pulled at his pajama sleeve. “But what if they’re still up there?”

  “You’ve been watching too many Bogie movies.”

  “I’ve been broken into!”

  Marcus pulled her into a hug. “Someone has broken into your shop, trashed the place looking for something other than money, then pocketed a bottle of perfume on the way out. That’s odd, no matter which way you cut it.” He climbed onto the first rungs of the ladder. “You got a flashlight?”

  She pulled one from under a pile of yellow chintz and handed it to him. “For God’s sake, be careful.”

  When he reached the top of the ladder, he pressed his hands to the trapdoor and gently lifted it. It gave way with no effort. He climbed into the crawl space and out of sight.

  “What can you see?” she called.

  “It’s like an attic up here. It stretches the entire length of the building.”

  “All six stores?” When he didn’t answer, she cupped her hands around her mouth. “Marcus?”

  “Give me a second.” A few minutes ticked by. When he reappeared in the trapdoor hole, his face was the picture of surprise.

  “That woman who opened a boutique three doors down.”

  “Yvette?”

  “Have you seen her lately?”

  “We nodded hello a couple of days ago. Why?”

  “Each of these stores has a trapdoor, so I peeked through hers.”

  “And?”

  He lowered himself down the ladder. “It’s eleven thirty on a Thursday and she’s closed.”

  “Marcus, you’re scaring me.”

  “Isn’t she the girl who tried to poison Zanuck? And wasn’t she using an alias back then? Or is Yvette her alias now?”

  Gwendolyn grabbed her keys, unlocked her front door, and ran three doors down to Yvette’s. Not even the window lights were on. The store was shrouded in darkness so impenetrable that she couldn’t see through to the back.

  CHAPTER 22

  Gloria Swanson wore a hat trimmed in white fur with a foot-long white feather pinned to it and a net veil over her face. Her dress was black and a white stole was draped along her left shoulder, around her back, and hung over her right arm. She offered Kathryn a professional smile. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk the last time you visited.”

  Kathryn returned Swanson’s surprisingly firm handshake. I hope I look as good as she does when I’m fifty. “I showed up unannounced, so I hardly expected you to drop everything.”

  “What were we shooting that day?”

  “The card game with H.B. Warner, Buster Keaton, and Anna Neilson. That must have felt like the good old days.”

  “The old days don’t seem quite so golden now.” Swanson led Kathryn to a pair of director’s chairs facing the set of Samson and Delilah. Expanses of fabric hung like a desert tent around embroidered chaise lounges and scattered throw rugs.

  “I’m surprised to hear that.”

  Swanson’s face clouded over. “My character has spent years in seclusion reliving her halcyon days.” She ran her hand along the white fur. “I want to play her well, but I don’t want to become her.”

  In the three weeks since she had last been on the set of Sunset Boulevard, Kathryn’s thoughts had turned again and again to the photograph of the little girl and her awkward father. Curiosity plagued her at the oddest times. When Gwendolyn enlisted her to help clean up the mess in her store, she came across a pale blue velvet ribbon that reminded her of the one in the girl’s hair. And when she was listening to radio reports on the start of the espionage trial in New York, every time she heard the name Alger Hiss, she pictured the man in the photograph.

  Finally she could stand it no more and asked Paramount for a sit-down with Swanson. When they arranged for an on-set meeting, Kathryn assumed they’d be in Norma Desmond’s home. She was disappointed that her PR minder had escorted her to one of the sets left over from Samson and Delilah.

  Kathryn waved a hand toward the colorful carpets. “Are you recreating one of Norma’s movies?”

  “No, nothing like that. Norma comes to visit Mister DeMille as he’s filming his latest biblical epic. She feels that DeMille must come to her, so she sits and waits, and swats away that pesky microphone.” She pointed to a boom mike suspended to their right.

  “Norma Desmond is no fan of the microphone?”

  “She most certainly is not. At one point she tells Joe, ‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!’ I read that line and thought, That’s the key to my character right there.”

  Over the years, Kathryn had learned that certain types of stars tightened up at the sight of a notebook, as though everything they said could be used against them in the court of public opinion. So she initiated what appeared to be just a conversation, but was in fact a list of questions based on a mnemonic:

  G = Good old days of filmmaking, what were they like?

  L = Last time she saw DeMille—when?

  O = Oscar—is this role Oscar-worthy?

  R = Rekindle—could this role rekindle your film career?

  I = Independence—since your fifth divorce, do you prefer your independence?

  A = Acting—has your approach to acting changed?

  While crew members scurried around them, Kathryn did her best to keep her attention on Gloria’s answers. It wasn’t hard—they were stock questions to which Swanson was giving routine answers, and Kathryn was relieved when the assistant director approached them to announce Swanson was needed.

  Kathryn shook her hand and thanked her for her time, but could see that the actress was already focusing on the scene. She slipped outside and headed for Soundstage Nine.

  With only three or four working lights and nobody else around, the overflowing Desmond mansion took on the air of a mausoleum. Kathryn’s heels echoed on the tango floor as she approached the sideboard. She ran her eye along the frames, but didn’t see the photograph that had been haunting her for days. She made a second, slower pass.

  “Can I h
elp you?”

  Kathryn let out a yelp and pressed a hand to her chest.

  “They’re filming on Stage Sixteen today.” The guy’s voice had a you-shouldn’t-be-here edge.

  “I’ve just come from there.” She presented him with her sweetest smile. She knew who he was. “I’m Kathryn Massey from the Hollywood Reporter.” He nodded. “All nonessential personnel were asked to evacuate the soundstage, and I was so enamored by this set, I had to come back and see it again.” She raised her hands into the air. “What a feast for the eyes! You guys are a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination, and quite frankly, I can’t imagine how anybody could beat you.”

  That did the trick. His face relaxed into a proud smile.

  Kathryn stepped forward. “And you are?”

  “Sam Comer.”

  “That sweet young thing from PR mentioned you specifically. She said you and your team have really knocked it out of the park with this set.”

  “We’re mighty proud of our work here, even if I do say so myself.”

  “I have a question perhaps only you can answer. I understand all these photographs come from Miss Swanson’s personal collection.”

  “That’s right. Except for a few in the back, like here.” He pointed to the sideboard.

  “There was one that caught my eye. It was a shot of a little girl.”

  “Sitting on her father’s knee? Yeah, I know the one.”

  “It’s not here.”

  “The sound guy dropped the boom mike the other day. Miss Swanson nearly had a fit. That one took the brunt of the damage.”

  “It was in a glass frame.”

  “Yeah, I put it in a new one.”

  “Where is it now?”

  Comer looked around the set. “I think you’ll find it on the piano. Look, I just stopped by here to check the tiles, but I’m needed back on the Samson and Delilah set. Nobody is supposed to be here, but you’re Kathryn Massey, so if you could promise me that you won’t stay long . . .?”

  Kathryn crossed her heart and swore she wouldn’t be more than a minute or two. She hurried to the grand piano, but the photograph wasn’t there. She did, however, find it on the pipe organ.

  It was just as she remembered. A steady-eyed youngster in Mary Pickford sausage curls sitting on the knee of a starched banker type. The kid had such a self-composed little face. Kathryn wondered what the kid was thinking.

  Then the oddest thought popped into Kathryn’s head.

  That bow was brown.

  “And how would you know that?” Kathryn asked herself out loud.

  When the answer came to her, it was more like a leaky faucet dropping one word at a time. She opened her purse and slipped the frame inside.

  * * *

  Kathryn’s mother was the head telephone operator at the Chateau Marmont a few blocks from the Garden of Allah. She worked six days a week from eight in the morning to six at night. By six fifteen, she was fixing a brandy and dry in the kitchen of the employee bungalow she rented out back of the hotel.

  It was six twenty when Kathryn knocked. Francine opened the door, but Kathryn didn’t give her a chance to speak. She held up the photograph she’d just stolen. “You want to tell me about this?”

  There was no mistaking the recognition in Francine’s flinching eyes. But with it came surprise, and—Kathryn suspected—resignation. She stepped past her mother into the living room and dropped her handbag and gloves on the coffee table.

  Francine closed the door slowly; the hinges squeaked as though they were taking her full weight. She turned around, a shade or two paler. “Can I fix you a—”

  “I don’t want a drink. I want an explanation.”

  She joined Kathryn at the loveseat, where the two of them sat in a stony silence that scraped Kathryn’s nerves raw. She was determined to force Francine to speak first.

  Eventually, Francine drew in a breath. “Yes,” she said softly. “That is you.”

  “And the man?”

  Long pause. “Your father.”

  The mantel clock on the curio cabinet behind Kathryn ticked loudly. She counted ten ticks. “Go on.”

  Francine picked up the photograph, transfixed as Kathryn had been. “Where in God’s name did you find this?”

  “I want to know when it was taken, and I want to know where.”

  Francine gripped the frame more tightly. “You and I had been out here a few years when I received a letter from him. Quite out of the blue. I was using a new name, so how he tracked me down, I don’t know. He always was the resourceful type.” She laid the photo flat on her lap. “Oh, Kathryn dear, what good does it do to drag this up now? It’s all so long ago. Trust me, sleeping dogs—”

  “So he tracked you down and—?”

  Silence. Tick-tick-tick. Then, finally, “He said he was coming out west on business and that he wanted to pay a call. In fact, his words were: I want to see my baby.”

  A fist-sized chunk of Kathryn’s heart melted. There were other little girls at school who had no fathers, but they’d been killed in the Great War, so she’d pretended she lost hers in the same way.

  “When was this?”

  “You were about four.” Francine returned to the photo. “Handsome, wasn’t he?”

  “He doesn’t look too comfortable.”

  “He was quite emotional. He tried to hide it, but I could tell. He sat on the floor and played with you. He’d have stayed all day if I’d let him.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Seeing him again was hard. It brought up a flood of memories I’d tried to forget.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”

  She ran her finger around the circumference of the frame. “You were so young. I knew you wouldn’t remember, so I figured why bother?”

  “And the photo? Who took it?”

  “I did. He brought along his Brownie, and asked me to take photos. I didn’t think it was such a great idea, but I didn’t have the heart to turn him down. I snapped a whole roll of film—I didn’t really know what I was doing so I assumed none of them turned out. More than a year later, that photo arrived in the mail.” Francine tapped the glass. “See this painting behind you, the one of the forest? It used to hang over our fireplace. Is that what gave it away?”

  Kathryn saw now that one of the few constants of her childhood was visible over her father’s shoulder. “No,” she said. “It was the bow in my hair.”

  “Oh, how you fought me every time I tried to put it on.” Francine studied the photograph some more. “That look on your face, it was your ‘I’m not happy about this horrid bow’ face. You had a name for it: The Brown Horrid.”

  Francine crossed to the kitchen counter where her brandy and dry sat waiting for her. “Are you going to tell me where you found it?”

  “Would you believe on the set of Billy Wilder’s new movie? How it wound up at Paramount is anybody’s guess. When was the last time you saw it?”

  Francine returned to the sofa and took a sip of her drink. “When I moved down to Long Beach. I hired a moving company, but they lost one of the boxes.”

  “And studios buy lost property from all sorts of companies as a cheap way to acquire more props.”

  “I guess that’s what happened.”

  “Did you ever hear from him again?”

  She shook her head.

  “So you don’t know where he is now?” Kathryn had pushed the conversation onto thin ice. She’d been harboring a secret about her father since the war ended, but it was time to come clean.

  “You’re not thinking of trying to track him down, I hope.” Francine drew back. “Your father was a decent man, but he only took the trouble to come see you that one time. You’ve done well without him, so in my opinion, there’s nothing to be gained by—”

  “I already know where he is.”

  The ticking clock dominated the room once more as Kathryn and her mother sat staring at each other.

  Francine said, “Are you referring to Sing
Sing?”

  “YOU KNEW?! And you never thought to tell me?”

  “Mightn’t I say the same?” Francine lobbed back.

  It was a fair point. If Kathryn let this conversation devolve into one of their usual yelling matches, the ice beneath their feet might crack. She calmed herself by clasping her hands together.

  “How did you find out?” Francine asked.

  “It’s a convoluted story.” Nelson Hoyt never had explained how he learned of Thomas Danford’s whereabouts. Then again, she never asked. And all this time, my own mother knew. How much easier this news would have been to hear if I could have heard it from her?

  “A reliable source?” Francine asked.

  “The FBI.”

  “And I suppose they told you what he’s in for?”

  “It was the same day the Japs surrendered. There was a lot going on.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  “Is it bad?”

  “They don’t send you to Sing Sing for shoplifting.”

  “Maybe I would like one of those drinks.”

  Francine returned to her kitchen. She said nothing until she was back on the sofa. “He was convicted of treason via the Smith Act.”

  Kathryn took a long, reluctant sip, putting off the inevitable. Finally she asked, “What did he do?”

  “He was convicted of selling secrets to the Germans.”

  Good God, there’s no bouncing back from that.

  “It was a sensational trial,” Francine continued, “at least as far as New England was concerned, because there was talk of him running for Massachusetts governor after the war. But of course that dream died.”

  “How long did he get?”

  “Twenty-two years, although he could be out in fifteen. Good behavior, and all that.”

  Kathryn executed some mental math. He won’t be out of jail until the 1960s. So far away it might as well be forever.

  “For what it’s worth,” Francine said, “I’m not completely convinced he was guilty.”

  Francine usually assumed the worst in any given situation, so this declaration was as shocking as Truman’s win over Dewey.