Searchlights and Shadows (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 4) Read online

  Kathryn watched the woman’s padded shoulders drop a full inch and thought, You’re the one who’s done me a favor. “How can I reach you?”

  “I’ll be at the Town House Hotel on Wilshire until the end of the month.” Mrs. Quinn stood up, expressed her thanks, and left the pressroom.

  As she watched her lover’s wife recede from view, Kathryn felt the bonds tying her to Roy begin to wither. She picked up the telegram and started to fan herself with it. “The end,” she said out loud. “Oh, Jesus, the boss!”

  She was more than halfway down the corridor when she realized she still had the telegram in her hand. She slipped it behind a bra strap as she walked into Vera’s office. Vera waved her past.

  Wilkerson was seated amid the relentless tidal waves of paperwork that advanced and retreated across his desk, his attention trained on the distant Hollywood Hills beyond the broad windows that overlooked Sunset Boulevard. As she approached, her eyes fell on a single sheet of paper at the center of the detritus. Kathryn squinted and tilted her head. It was a list of people who worked at the Hollywood Reporter. The list had a title, but it was obscured by a red pencil.

  “You rang?”

  Wilkerson swung around to face her. “We need to talk, Massey.”

  Normally, she loved hearing Wilkerson address her that way; it showed he saw her as one of the guys. But discussions that started out with “We need to talk” never seemed to end well. She felt a rough patch of chipped nail on her right middle finger and dug it into her thumb. As Wilkerson reached for a fresh cigar, he brushed aside the red pencil to reveal the list’s title: LAYOFFS.

  She braced herself. “Talk about what?”

  “Circulation.”

  She had to force herself to keep her eyes from skimming the list for her own name. “What of it?”

  He pulled a ledger from a pile of paperwork. It was covered in columns of typed numbers. “Looks like people are more interested in war news than Hollywood news—even the people who work in the movies.”

  “You can’t blame people for caring more about America’s next move against Japan than what Abbott and Costello’s next picture is going to be.”

  “Tell that to my bottom line.”

  “Boss,” she said, “are we in trouble? Financially?”

  His eyes turned flinty. “We need to do something to boost circulation.”

  Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it? The subject of these layoffs is not up for discussion. She snapped her fingers to dispel the tension that had ballooned between them. “What about a color spread?” she suggested. “There’s that new picture with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, To Be Or Not To Be. It’s set in Warsaw after the Nazis invaded, so it’s topical, war-related. And it’s Lubitsch plus Lombard, so it’s bound to be a smash. I’m pretty good pals with the publicity honcho over at United Artists.”

  “You need to think bigger, Massey.”

  “Bigger—how?”

  “Radio.”

  “You want to advertise on the radio?”

  A look of testiness flashed across his face. “We need to get you on the radio.”

  “ME?!”

  “Your readership is pretty much limited to LA. If we could get you on the radio, your audience could go nationwide. Take a moment to picture that.”

  Kathryn didn’t need a moment. The thought of raising her profile to a national level was beyond thrilling. What she needed instead was a moment to digest the fact that she evidently wasn’t on Wilkerson’s layoffs list. “Sounds great,” she hedged, “but how would I get on the air?”

  “That’s for you to figure out.” He picked up a stack of papers and started to straighten them—his sign that the meeting was over. “Let me know what you come up with.”

  Feeling lightheaded, Kathryn was still walking back to her desk when she felt the telegram tucked into her brassiere scrape against her skin.

  Oh, Lord.

  If she were to get on the radio, more people would know of her, and would want to know about her. It was Louella Parsons who’d led Kathryn to discover her bastard past, and she had promised to keep the information to herself. But what about Hedda Hopper? Or Sheilah Graham? Or God only knew who else might stumble across this information? And if they did, what might they do with it?

  CHAPTER 3

  Marcus Adler peered into the empty grave dug that morning for Hugo Marr and found he couldn’t see the bottom. “Where do they plan on burying him?” he asked out loud. “China?”

  Kathryn joined him at the edge. “The priest told me it’s a family tradition. They go twelve feet down.”

  Marcus looked around. The Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery was deserted except for the small group gathered near the rectangular hole carved into this lonely corner. “It’s pretty sad, isn’t it?”

  “This whole situation is sad. There are no winners here.”

  “When it comes time to bury me, I’d like to think more than ten people would show up.”

  “Hopefully you wouldn’t have to compete with Carole Lombard.”

  It had been five days since the news of Lombard’s death had punched America in the gut. Her funeral on the other side of town promised to be the biggest in years.

  “Speaking of,” Marcus said, “aren’t you supposed to be there?”

  “Yuh-huh.”

  “And when your boss realizes you’re not?”

  “He won’t be happy.” Kathryn penetrated him with her mahogany eyes. “But I wanted to be here.”

  Marcus raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you the thoughtful one. Honestly, though, if you need to go to Forest Lawn, I’d understand.”

  Kathryn shook her head. “If Wilkerson has a problem with me being here, he can lump it. We’re at war now. Priorities change.”

  “Thank you.” Marcus grabbed Kathryn’s hand and kissed it, then sighed. “Poor old Hugo.”

  Seven weeks ago, before Pearl Harbor made the world feel like a darkly different place, Marcus’ friend and fellow MGM screenwriter, Hugo Marr, had called him to his apartment to confess a tearful litany of sins before pulling out a gun and shooting himself. Hugo had screwed up his own suicide—the bullet shot through his cheek and didn’t touch his brain—and he’d teetered for six weeks before succumbing to his wounds.

  A teal Hudson rolled through the shadows of the palm trees slanting across the lawn, its tires scrunching on the gravel until it came to a stop near the silent group. Two men in dark gray suits got out: Jim Taggert, Marcus’ boss at MGM, and his lover, Vernon, a screenwriter at Columbia who everybody called Hoppy.

  Taggert took in the dozen or so people milling around. “This is all he gets?”

  “Not even his dad’s shown up,” Marcus said.

  “He’s here,” Taggert said. “We passed him on the way in.”

  “And looking pretty soused,” Hoppy added. “I suspect we may be waiting a while.” He took in a guy in the shade of a nearby oak tree, dressed in full Scottish Highland regalia, a set of bagpipes tucked under his arm. “I hope they’re not paying him by the hour.”

  Taggert shot Marcus an unsettling look. It wasn’t a stink eye exactly, but it was a close cousin.

  The four of them stood at the grave in awkward silence. Hoppy broke it when he urged them into a huddle. “You know what I’ve just noticed? Excluding us, there are eight people here. How come four of them are from Paramount?”

  What Taggert and Hoppy didn’t know was that before he shot himself, Hugo confessed to Marcus that he’d been spying on MGM. Hugo wasn’t sure who’d been paying him, but suspected it was Paramount. The only people Marcus had told were Gwendolyn and Kathryn. Kathryn was looking at him now, locking him in with those sharp eyes of hers.

  “Are you sure?” Marcus asked Hoppy.

  “The guy without his hat is from legal. The one with the checked tie is in security.”

  “You might have a point,” Kathryn added. “I’ve met the one with the Durante honker; he’s in production design.”

  “The ta
ll one with the wavy dark hair standing by himself, I know him,” Taggert said. “He runs the team that reads magazine short stories and gets galleys of new novels.”

  Marcus checked out the chap standing alone and felt a flicker of recognition. “I’ve met him, too,” he whispered. “But not from the studios. Something social, a while ago.”

  “He used to be the slimiest kind of journalist,” Taggert said. “Real muckraking type, a studio PR’s worst nightmare. Then something must have happened, because suddenly he was at Paramount.”

  Hoppy cocked his head to one side. “Here comes Hugo’s father.”

  He pointed to a sky-blue Pontiac Opera Coupe that was dented with rust spots. It spluttered along the gravel until it came to a stop behind Taggert’s Buick. The driver hurried around to the passenger side, but Edwin Marr pushed him away with his cane and heaved himself to his unsteady feet. His desiccated skin was stippled with liver spots and sun blemishes, and stretched tautly over his cheeks and knuckles.

  The Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery butted up against the Paramount studio lot, and Hugo’s gravesite was positioned two rows from the weathered fence between the two. In the distance, Marcus heard someone shout, “And . . . ACTION!” as Marr staggered toward them, scrutinizing the small gathering around his son’s grave.

  “This isn’t right,” Marr griped. “No parent should have to bury his child.”

  With Bible in hand, the pale-faced priest chose this moment to approach the plot, but Marr pulled him aside to berate him about the tombstone.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, come on,” Taggert muttered. “Some of us don’t have all day.”

  Taggert flashed Marcus that odd look again. It definitely wasn’t a stink eye—there was an air of apprehension to it, Marcus decided. Something must have happened.

  As Hugo’s father hissed and wheezed at the priest, Marcus snuck a sideways glance at the slimy Paramount guy, and a long-forgotten memory detonated in Marcus’ mind. About six or seven years ago, he’d been invited to one of George Cukor’s Sunday brunches. All the guests were homos, including a scattering of sailors. Marcus discovered that one of the sailors was a yellow journalist in disguise who’d managed to sneak inside. Marcus overheard him on the telephone to his editor, and he immediately told Cukor. He now tried to think of the skunk’s name. Cliff? No—Clifford something. Starting with W, maybe?

  They watched Edwin Marr harangue the priest some more, then Marcus felt Taggert pull at his elbow and lead him away from the group.

  “This might go on for a while,” Taggert said, nodding to Hugo’s father, “and I’ve got a ton of things to attend to when we get back to the office, so I might as well break the news to you now.”

  “Does this have anything to do with the fish eye you’ve been giving me since you got here?” Marcus asked.

  Taggert grunted. “I had a meeting early this morning with Mayer and Mannix. Pearl From Pearl Harbor was on the agenda.”

  Pearl From Pearl Harbor was Marcus’ next writing assignment, a vehicle for Judy Garland. Everyone from Louis B. Mayer down had been excited about it, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it hardly seemed the right setting for a musical comedy. It wouldn’t be hard to relocate it, though, so Marcus wasn’t worried.

  Taggert eyed Marr for a moment. “Turns out Mannix lost a nephew, a cousin, and the sons of two boyhood pals in Pearl Harbor.” A roughly hewn ex-bouncer from a New Jersey amusement park, Eddie Mannix was MGM’s vice president, Mayer’s right-hand man, and almost without equal in power.

  “Obviously we can’t set the movie there anymore,” Marcus said. “Cuba could work. Maybe The Cutie From Cuba. No, that’s horrible. I just need a couple of days—”

  “The project’s been scrapped.”

  A mournful note from the bagpiper hovered over their heads.

  “The central story is strong,” Marcus persisted. “We just need to—”

  “Mannix is superstitious. He thinks any movie set in Pearl Harbor is jinxed, even if we reset it someplace else. He argued and badgered until L.B. canceled the whole thing. Sorry, Marcus, but Pearl Harbor is history.”

  * * *

  Marcus could feel Kathryn’s eyes on him.

  “You’re upset,” she observed, “but not about Hugo.”

  Marcus stared at the back of the taxi driver’s head. “Pearl From Pearl Harbor is off the books.”

  “Tough break,” she said, “but that can’t have come as a surprise.”

  “I was going to be writing the next Judy Garland picture and now I’ve got nothing.”

  He felt Kathryn’s hand grasp his. “They pay you too much these days to let you sit around on your keister.”

  “I didn’t realize how much I was banking on it.”

  She nudged his shoulder as the taxi turned onto Sunset Boulevard. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’ll have a whole bunch more brainwaves before you’re done. Look at William Tell—talk about a great idea.”

  “Yeah, until Hugo buried it and gave it to Paramount.”

  “Hmmm, about that.” Kathryn’s sly tone took on an arresting edge. “Speaking of Paramount, I was on the lot the other day. They’re doing a third Road To movie; Morocco this time. At any rate, one of the PR guys was shuttling me around, and there was a delay on set. We got to chatting about upcoming productions, so I asked him.”

  “Asked him what?”

  “I said, ‘Got any dirt on this William Tell picture I’ve heard about?’”

  Kathryn’s moxie never failed to surprise Marcus. “You sneaky little—what did he say?”

  “He’d never heard of it. So he called some pal in production planning and the guy hadn’t heard of it either.”

  “But it was Hugo’s job to bury our ideas and slip them to Paramount.” The gears in Marcus’ mind started to rotate. Pearl From Pearl Harbor was good, but William Tell was a winner.

  Kathryn wagged a finger at him. “All I’m saying is if you want to try refloating William Tell, you ought to make sure Hugo didn’t do his job. Before a movie gets the go-ahead, where does it live?”

  Marcus took off his horn-rimmed glasses and polished them with his necktie. Gestating story ideas was the domain of the writing department and he’d just learned that at Paramount they came under the jurisdiction of a skunk called Clifford. Marcus shook his head. “Of all people.”

  “Right,” Kathryn said. “If you want William Tell back, you need to find out if that slimeball’s got it.”

  “How? By breaking in?”

  The smile on Kathryn’s face swelled from sly to wily. “I had something a tad more legal in mind. You know our new downstairs neighbor?”

  “The assistant director?”

  “I did a favor for his girl. She’s a big Jimmy Stewart fan, so I arranged for her to accidentally-on-purpose meet him at Ciro’s.”

  Marcus put his glasses back on and Kathryn’s face resumed its sharp features. “So now he owes you one.”

  “Did you know he works for Preston Sturges?”

  “And the Sturges unit is at Paramount.”

  “Now you’ve got it. Sturges writes all his own movies, but his scripts have to be approved by the Breen Office, just like everyone else’s. He needs someone to liaise between him, his writers, and the Breen Office, and that liaison is our downstairs neighbor.”

  The taxi pulled to the Sunset Boulevard curb outside the Garden of Allah. Marcus paid the driver and they both got out. “So you think your neighbor would be willing to snoop around the Paramount writers’ department?” he asked. “That’s a mighty big favor.”

  Kathryn cracked open her handbag and pulled out her gloves. “Apparently his girl was very—ahem—grateful. He told me that his loyalties are with Sturges, not Paramount, so there’s a good chance he’ll be amenable.”

  Marcus’ hand lay on the brass doorknob of the front door of the Garden of Allah’s main building. The smoothly polished metal felt cold to the touch, but it shone in the January sun like an Oscar statuette. “Miss Massey,�
�� he said, “I like your thinking.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Gwendolyn was still furious as she strode toward the front doors of the Bullocks Wilshire department store. What a condescending little twerp, looking down his stubby nose at me like I’m some character out of a Russian novel, all grubby and downtrodden. “We don’t lend money to women. Especially single women. And certainly not single women who want to open up their own business.” In other words, “Wouldn’t your time be better spent looking for a husband?”

  She’d wanted to upend the little toad’s coffee cup all over his fanatically neat desk, but she reminded herself that she was a lady in a man’s world and gracefully withdrew from the office before she soiled the smart deep-turquoise suit she’d sewn specifically for the loan interview.

  It’s all quite out of the question, Miss Brick.

  She pushed open the heavy glass door and let the store’s refined atmosphere calm her. She always felt so peaceful there. Not that she could ever afford it, but it didn’t cost anything to dream.

  It also didn’t cost to check out the merchandise, examine the stitching, feel the cloth, and analyze the construction. It’s all in the name of inspiration, she told herself. If Chez Gwendolyn was going to be a success, she needed to fill it with the best designs.

  In the women’s evening wear department, a series of eight mannequins stood in a row. A particularly striking floor-length gown in a deep violet tulle caught Gwendolyn’s eye. She held the material between her fingers; it was like stroking moonbeams. Twenty-nine ninety-five was an outrageous amount to pay for a gown, even one as beautiful as this. Gwendolyn figured she could duplicate it for five or six bucks—seven at most—and sell it for fifteen, maybe even twenty if it came out real well. Her heart quickened.

  “Would Madame care to try this on?”

  The query came from a redhead as tall as Gwendolyn and roughly her age—the unfortunate side of thirty. Her engraved nametag read Miss Delores but her frozen smile said, You can’t afford this dress anymore than I can.

  Gwendolyn shook her head. “I can tell the waist is too low.”