American Blonde (23 page)

He was the biggest star at the biggest studio. He was worth millions to Louis B. Mayer and the rest of them.

I set down the magazines and rubbed my head. I had more questions for Dr. Murdoch, and questions for the guests of Broad Water. I had letters to write and business to take care of that had nothing to do with the death of Barbara Fanning. I thought about all there was to do, and then I picked up one of the magazines again. I stared at Nigel, as if he might tell me something. I tore the cover off. I set it aside and there, on the next page of the magazine, was Mudge in an ad for Lux soap. I tore this page out as well. Five pages later, I found Hal MacGinnis. Two pages after that, Babe King. On the following page, Ophelia Lloyd.

It only took me half an hour to sort through a stack of magazines and cut out pictures of everyone who was at Broad Water the night Mudge died, except for Yilla King and Dr. Atwill. On the wall of my bedroom, I taped a picture of Mudge at her most glamorous. Photographer: Virgil Apger.

On an index card I wrote,
Found Sat., Dec 28, around 11:45 p.m. on the floor of the bathroom off the music room at Broad Water, home of Billy Taub and Ophelia Lloyd. Last word spoken: “Rebecca.”

Then, in order of suspicion, I tacked the other pictures on the wall below Mudge. I wrote down what I knew—motives; the ways everyone was related to each other; the ways they were related to Mudge; where they’d been during the game.

Half an hour later, I was in bed. I closed my eyes and told myself to let it all go for now. I could pick it up again in a few hours.

By the time I was awake, minutes after nine, Helen had made coffee and breakfast. Even in the morning, she looked as smart and chic as a model for
Cosmopolitan
magazine. She said, “What on earth happened to your head, Hartsie?”

I touched the bump, where it had started to bruise. “I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and ran smack into the wall.” I poured myself a cup of coffee, swallowed two aspirin, and sat down at the kitchen table.

“Now why don’t I believe you?” Helen cocked her head at me.

“Any luck finding Mudge’s will?”

“Okay, I’ll drop it. Just know I’m interested if you ever want to tell me what really happened.” She settled elegantly on the chair across from mine. “I can’t figure out where she put it. She was the most disorganized person I’ve ever known, and she kept everything—fan letters, hate mail, movie stills, magazine clippings. Nothing’s where it should be. Flora’s promised to help me look. She knew her better than anyone and she might be able to make sense of her filing system, such as it was.” She nodded at the morning newspaper. “Did you hear about this poor girl?”

The front page of the
Los Angeles Examiner
read:
Slain by a fiend, the body of a teenage girl was found in a vacant lot here yesterday. The nude body was severed at the waist. The girl had been killed elsewhere and her body taken to the lot and left in plain view, not three feet from the sidewalk. Death came to the girl, police scientists said, after hours of torture.

Accompanying the article, which took up almost the entire page, was a photograph of the victim, body covered by a blanket, eyes closed, black hair a cloud around her head. She looked peaceful as she lay next to a sidewalk on the edge of an overgrown field in Leimert Park, the neighborhood where Flora lived, near downtown Los Angeles.

As I studied the picture of the girl in the field, my head throbbed. I told myself that what had happened the night before was an accident. The man was just a bad driver. He hadn’t been looking or paying attention.

But what if he had wanted to run me off the road?

I crept along at twenty miles an hour the entire way to the studio. I watched the mirrors, flinching at every truck that entered the street. As I turned onto Venice Boulevard, the traffic picked up. Off to my right, a train rattled past on the raised tracks of the Venice Short Line.

I made it to Metro without anyone following me, and went directly to the portrait studio, where I told the girls working there I wanted to see Virgil Apger. “You aren’t scheduled for today, Miss Rogers,” one of them said, finger running up and down the page of her appointment book.

The studio was filled with file cabinets and card catalogs of indexes, but I believed what I’d told Coroner Nigh. The crime scene photographs wouldn’t be here with everything else. If they even still existed, pictures and negatives would most likely be under lock and key somewhere in the Thalberg Building, which might as well be Fort Knox. But I had to be sure.

“Oh, I’m not scheduled, but I wanted to ask Virgil a question. Is it okay if I leave a note for him on his desk?”

She got up and walked to his office, knocking on the door even though it stood open. “Go on in.”

I thanked her and slipped inside, running my eyes over the room, the walls covered in framed photographs of his most famous subjects—Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Joan Crawford, Hedy Lamarr. There was only one file cabinet in here, behind his desk. I glanced at the open door, making sure no one was watching, and, just in case, helped myself to a pen and a piece of official portrait studio letterhead. I bent over the desk, pretending to write, and did a quick, quiet search through the drawers, looking for a key. It sat, like it was waiting, in the middle drawer, the last one I checked. Too easy, I thought.

I picked it up, and with another glance at the door, kneeled in front of the filing cabinet and opened it with a click. I waited, listened, glanced, and then slid the drawer open. Inside were envelopes of negatives, labeled on the outside—“Garland,” “Johnson,” “Turner,” “Loy.” And “Fanning.” There was only one strip of pictures. I held it up to the light, heart starting to pound—but in each frame Mudge was very much alive, and naked as could be.

At the sound of footsteps, I dropped the negatives into the envelope, slid the drawer closed, turned the key, and was just bending over the desk again, the key in my hand, when Virgil Apger appeared. “Miss Rogers?”

“I was just leaving you a note.” I held up the half-written piece of paper, then crumpled it and pretended to search for the trashcan behind the desk. The key in my hand felt like a hundred-pound weight.

“I’ll take that,” he said, and started toward me, but at that moment one of the girls called his name, and as he turned, I slid the drawer open a fraction of an inch, dropped in the key, and closed it again.

When he turned back to me, I walked over to him and said, “I wanted you to hear it from me first. About the bump on my head. I know I’m due to have photos taken in a few days, and I wanted to see if we should reschedule.”

He tilted my face to the light and examined the bump. “How did you do this?”

“I ran into a wall in the middle of the night.”

His eyes met mine before moving back to my forehead. “I don’t think it’s anything makeup and good lighting can’t fix. Is that the only reason you came to see me, Miss Rogers?” I could hear the wariness in his voice, or maybe I was only imagining it.

I almost said something. Someone had told me once that he was the son of a sheriff. I knew him to be a good, decent man. But just then a figure appeared in the doorway.

“Miss Rogers,” said Howard Strickling. “What a pleasure. Did you have a shoot scheduled for today?” There was a woman with him—Shelby Jordan.

What incredible timing, I thought. How surprising to see Mr. Strickling at this exact moment.

“I was just showing Virgil the bump I got from walking into a wall. I wanted to give him fair warning so he knew what he was up against.”

Mr. Strickling smiled. I smiled.

“Thanks, Mr. Apger,” I said. “You’ve made me feel much better.”

Outside again, I went directly to the first-aid department, which was housed in a little building near the dressing rooms. This time, Dr. Atwill studied the bump on my forehead.

He said, “How did you get this?

I decided to change my story to something that might sound more believable. “A dog ran out in front of my car. I hit the brakes to avoid him and bumped my head.”

What was it Dr. Atwill had said about Benzedrine and Seconal?
Everyone uses them, Miss Rogers. When taken in the right combination, they’re perfectly safe.

Unless you’re poisoned.

“You may get a bruise, nothing they can’t cover with makeup.”

“I have a nasty headache.”

“To be expected.” He made some notes on a chart and then reached behind him into a cabinet with glass doors that was stocked with pill bottles. As he reached for the aspirin, I practiced Babe’s doe-eyed look. “It’s just that I’ve had trouble sleeping ever since Barbara Fanning’s death, and during the day I’m so tired.” I was thinking of the pills, now missing, from Mudge’s purse.

He handed me two bottles. “You’re not the only one, Miss Rogers. A perfectly normal reaction to such a tragedy.”

I held up the Benzedrine. “How many of these can I take at a time?”

“No more than two.”

“And these?” I waved the bottle of Seconal.

“No more than two.”

“Is it possible to overdose? I wouldn’t want to take too many.”

“Yes. Twenty-three hundred milligrams of Benzedrine is enough to kill a person of, let’s say, one hundred twenty-five pounds.” He smiled. “And you weigh a little less than that.”

I smiled. “On a good day.” Doe eyes, I told myself, and gave them an extra bat-bat-bat. “That sounds like an awful lot. You know, I’ve always been sensitive to medicine—what symptoms should I look out for, just in case they don’t agree with me?”

“Oh, a pulse that skyrockets. High blood pressure. Headache, vomiting. Just the right amount helps the energy, but even a little too much can cause delusions, euphoria, and dizziness.”

So it was possible to take too much, to kill yourself or someone else. I wondered who else had sought out the good doctor’s services lately, because everyone at the studio was connected through Dr. Atwill. They all came to him sooner or later.

On the way back to my dressing room, I passed by the Little Red Schoolhouse, where a few of the child actors sat on the stoop under the arched front doorway. They squeezed close, too many of them to fit, and tried to knock each other off the step and onto the ground. Every time someone tumbled over, they fell on top of each other, laughing and whooping. The sound and sight of it was so happy that I stopped to watch them. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt that way, so light and worry-free.

I could go home. I could leave right now, this afternoon, and then I would be light and worry-free too.

Like that, I was on my way to the parking lot. I would tell Johnny Clay and Butch, and also Helen and Flora, and then I would just go. No more studio. No more pills and accidents that might not be accidents. No more of people looking the other way and pretending nothing happened.

I climbed into the car. It would be so easy just to leave. And then I turned the key of the Oldsmobile Mudge had given me as a Christmas present, the one she’d had painted to match my truck.

“Where should we go?”

“Anywhere! And everywhere. Let’s just drive.”

So I headed back to Beverly Hills, because I couldn’t leave. Not yet.

B
arbara Fanning had moved off the front page, replaced by the young girl found murdered in Leimert Park. The
Examiner
identified her as Elizabeth Short, twenty-two years old, of Medford, Massachusetts. She was five feet six inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. She had brown hair and green eyes and a fair complexion. Her hair had been hennaed and her brown roots had just begun to regrow. In the 1943 Santa Barbara Police Department photo that ran alongside the story, she looked eerily, spookily like Mudge.

I read the news on the front step of Mudge’s house, without bothering to move inside. A man drove past, very slowly, hat drawn low over his face. I looked up to watch him, and he caught my eye. As he kept on going, I went back to the newspaper. Even after I heard my name, I continued reading.

The paper confirmed that Dr. Frederick Murdoch, the chief autopsy surgeon for the County of Los Angeles, had performed the autopsy on the person the
Examiner
was now calling the Black Dahlia because of her habit of dressing in black and wearing a flower in her hair.

“Hartsie.” Helen opened the door and stuck her head out. “There you are.” She pointed to the hall. “There’s something I want to show you.”

As I was turning to follow her inside, the same man drove by in the other direction. One door down, he pulled over and parked the car. I waited for him to get out, but he only sat there, engine idling.

“Hartsie.” Helen was back again. “What are you doing?”

This time I followed her into the house. Spread out on the dining room table were a newspaper article, a photograph, and what looked like a letter.

“I found them inside a book.”

The letterhead belonged to Fred Wamack, Private Investigator, Hollywood, California. It was addressed to Eloise Mudge.
Per your request, I have conducted an independent investigation into the whereabouts of one John Doe, age 11, born September 1935, birth name ‘John Henry Briggs.’

John Henry Briggs

His report went on to say that the child was now living at the Dell Rapids Orphanage and Industrial School, also known as the Dell Rapids Odd Fellows Home, in Dell Rapids, South Dakota. The newspaper article was dated October 1946. It detailed a new addition to the home, originally built in 1910, and a need for funding. It featured four pictures—the home itself, a handsome English manor house of red brick, which rose out of the flat, dry landscape; children planting potatoes; children gathered around a phonograph; and four boys sitting in a freshly plowed field. The smallest boy was circled. He sat on one end, a little behind the others, his face puckered, as if he was looking into the sun. The photograph appeared to be of the same child, hands at his sides, dressed in a suit.

There wasn’t much more to it than that. Page two of the letter was a carbon copy of a document that read
Orphan Home, Lodge #8, Dell Rapids, South Dakota, History and Record of Resident. Date of Admission: Dec. 25, 1935. When and where born: Washita Co. Oklahoma, September 13, 1935.
At the end of his letter, Investigator Fred Wamack said he was glad to look into the matter deeper, if she was interested. The date of the letter was December 2, 1946.

I picked up the photograph of the little boy. “Do you think he’s hers?”

“He must be.”

“But why would she have given him up? She dreamed of having kids. She said she and Nigel were going to have a houseful.”

“Maybe one reason she wanted children so badly was because she’d had to give a child away.”

“Do you think it’s strange that a woman who kept everything doesn’t have a single paper relating to her childhood or where she came from? No birth certificate. No pictures. It’s almost as if she didn’t exist until the summer of 1933 when she signed with MGM.”

“Think of it this way—didn’t we all start over, in a sense, when we went to the WASP? And then again after the war? How many people out here know about your ex-husband, Harley Bright? I think she wanted to give herself a new life, that’s all.”

“You said you found the orphans’ home information in a book?”

“It’s upstairs.”

This time, I followed Helen to Mudge’s room. Everything was as she’d left it—the vanity table crowded with perfumes and powders, the little desk turned toward one window, the blue embossed stationery stacked on top, the blue bedspread, the blue flowered wallpaper, a script lying atop the bedside table.
A Woman of Means
by Sam Weldon.

I flipped it open and glanced at the first few pages. “I didn’t know Sam Weldon wrote another script for Metro.”

Helen handed me something. “The book.”
Jane Eyre.

I opened it, searching through from front to back. On nearly every page, Mudge had underlined sentences or whole paragraphs. “Where did you find it?”

“In the drawer here.” She opened it to show me.

I had not intended to love him. . . . He made me love him without looking at me.

“Did you find anything else?” Helen asked, peering over my shoulder at the book.

“No,” I said. Maybe, I thought.

When I walked outside to my car, the man with the hat was gone. I climbed into the yellow Oldsmobile and headed to Hollywood.

Fred Wamack, private investigator, worked out of an office on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The door to the building was so narrow, I almost missed it. But there was his name on a list by the entrance: F. Wamack, P.I., Suite 202. He answered the buzzer, “Wamack.”

“Mr. Wamack, I’m a friend of Eloise Mudge. I understand you did some work for her.”

The door buzzed and clicked. Inside, there was a door to my right and one to my left, and a rickety staircase in the middle. I walked up the stairs and saw 202 at the end of the hall. The door stood open.

It was just one room, bright with a corner view. Fred Wamack sat behind the desk, which was messy with papers, cigarette burning in the ashtray. He was thick and broad with a full head of hair and two chins. He was chewing gum, and he didn’t bother standing. “You’re a friend of Eloise Mudge?”

“Yes, sir.” He didn’t offer me a seat, but I sat anyway, dragging the chair away from the wall, closer to the desk. “I know you did some work for her.”

“That’s right.” He eyed me like I might be a criminal. “Sorry to hear about her death.”

“Thank you. I’m just going through her files, trying to put things in order, and wanted to ask if you could tell me anything more than what was in your report, about who the child was and why she needed the information.”

“Sorry. I’m sure I don’t need to explain client confidentiality.”

“It’s just that I’ve got a mountain of paperwork to go through, and if you could tell me anything that might help me—”

“If I were you, Miss . . . ?”

“Hart.”

“If I were you, Miss Hart, I’d stop asking questions. I’m doing you a favor by telling you that. I’m saving you a lot of trouble.”

I gave him a sad smile. Then I glanced down and glanced up again with a look I’d seen Mudge give Felix Roland or Tauby when she wanted to get her way. “Could you at least tell me when she hired you?”

He picked up the cigarette, pressing the gum into the ashtray with his thumb. “Last fall.”

“Can you tell me why she needed to find this boy?”

“No. But it seemed awful important. Know how I know? Because she walked in here off the street. No phone call. Barbara Fanning, the movie star, just as plain as you or me, sitting right in that very same chair you’re sitting in now. She said, ‘I need you to find someone for me. And I need it done as fast as you can.’ I told her if I’d known she was coming, I woulda dressed up.”

“But she hired you as Eloise Mudge?”

“That’s right.” He flicked the ashes onto the gum. “Said we had to keep it confidential.”

“How did she find you?”

“I’ve handled more than one movie star case in my career. When she asked for recommendations, my name came up.”

“After you gave her the information, did she say she needed anything else?”

Before he could answer, the phone on his desk rang. He picked it up. “Wamack.” He listened, dug for a file, sending other files spilling onto the floor. “Got it right here, old man.” He looked at me, covering the receiver. “Nice chatting with you, Miss Hart. Or should I say ‘Miss Rogers’? If you don’t mind, do me a favor and close the door on your way out.”

Back at Mudge’s house, I phoned Dr. Murdoch, and when I couldn’t reach him I tried Lara Yacoubian, secretary to the coroner. She answered on the first ring, and I could hear voices in the background. When I told her who I was, she whispered, “I can’t talk right now,” and then, louder, “Could I have him return your call?”

“Get back to me when you can,” I said, giving her the number. “I wanted to know if Dr. Murdoch saw anything in the autopsy relating to Benzedrine or Seconal.”

After hanging up, I dialed the operator and placed a long distance call. After a few rings, a voice crackled on the line. “Dell Rapids Home, how may I help you?” It was a woman’s voice, pleasant and cheerful.

“Yes, I’m interested in making a donation to the children’s home.”

“Bless you, dear. Just one moment, please.”

I heard her walk away, shoes tapping across a hard floor. My heart started to race. A minute ticked by. Through the phone, I heard the sound of shoes tapping again. A woman’s voice said, “This is Ella Kingery. I understand you’d like to make a donation?”

“Yes, ma’am. I read an article about how the orphanage needs funding. I’m interested in contributing, but I’d like to know more about the home first.”

“Of course. I don’t know how much you know already, but we were built in 1910, and the building was dedicated in 1911. Nearly eight thousand people attended the ceremony. We have twenty-six children, ages six to seventeen, and twenty-one elderly. We have a staff of nine, including myself.”

She rattled off details about the reading room, nursery, infirmary rooms, quarantine rooms, barn, machine shed, silo, and hog house, and said the home sat on 172 acres. The staff and residents ran the farm, under the supervision of a hired farmer, both to supply the home and to sell products in town. The children divided work between the home and the farm, depending on age and gender. They received lessons in etiquette and moral education, held worship and sermons in the parlor and scriptural lessons at meals. They attended church weekly, rode the horses, listened to the phonograph, played baseball and croquet, and even had visits from Santa.

I told her this all sounded fine, and I wanted to write a sizable check, perhaps five hundred dollars.

She said, “This is quite generous, Miss . . .”

“Rogers. Kit Rogers. I was orphaned myself.”

I waited for the name to mean something to her, but she just said, “Thank you, Miss Rogers,” and gave me the mailing address.

“Would it be possible to make the donation in the name of a particular child?”

“An unusual request, but I’m sure we’ll be happy to oblige. The child’s name?”

“John Henry Briggs.”

“John Henry. Yes, we can do that. Are you a friend of John Henry’s?”

“No, ma’am, but a good friend of mine was.” I asked the next question that came to mind. “Once a child like John Henry is brought to the home, what are the odds of him leaving before he’s of age?”