An Inconvenient Woman (14 page)

“Interesting house you have, Mr. Stieglitz,” said Philip.

“I did a total gut job when I bought the house. Got rid of all the Spanish shit and gave it this French look. Thelma Todd built the house,” he said. “She was murdered. Remember that?”

“No,” said Philip.

“Way before your time. Way before my time too, as a matter of fact. I was gonna make a picture about the case once. Faye Converse was gonna play Thelma, but it never got off the ground. Couldn’t get all the elements together.”

There was a silence.

“About this drug picture,” said Casper.

“I think I’m not the right choice for this, Mr. Stieglitz,” said Philip.

“Fifty thousand down. Fifty thousand when you turn in
the first draft. Another fifty when we go into production. Not bad bucks for a young guy like you. You only got fifty for the whole fucking book you wrote on that chiseler Reza Bulbenkian.”

Philip laughed. “I’m at the Chateau. Let me talk to my agent, and I’ll call you.”

“Call me when? I gotta let the guy from the community service know, or I’ll be in violation.”

“This evening. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“Some guys would get down on their knees and kiss my hand at an offer like this.”

“I’m sure,” said Philip. “But I’m also sure that’s not the kind of guy you want for a project like this.”

He walked back through the living room and hall and opened the front door. Outside the sun was blinding. He covered his eyes with his hand. He would have to buy dark glasses, he decided, although he had an antipathy toward dark glasses. When he got into his car, he heard his name called. Turning, he saw Casper Stieglitz’s butler standing at the front door. Philip rolled down the window, and the butler walked up to the car.

“Yes?” asked Philip. He couldn’t remember the butler’s name.

“Of course, it doesn’t matter a bit,” said the butler.

“What doesn’t?”

“About the house.”

“What about it?”

“It wasn’t built by Thelma Todd at all. He always gets it wrong.” He shook his head in exasperation. “Thelma lived, and died, bless her soul, on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica.”

Philip stared at him.

“Mr. Stieglitz isn’t really interested in the history of Hollywood. This house was built by Gloria Swanson, when she was married to the Marquis de la Falaise. After they were divorced, Mr. Hearst tried to buy it for Marion Davies, but Miss Swanson didn’t want Marion Davies to have it for some reason, and she sold it instead to Constance Bennett. It was Miss Bennett who put on the mansard roof. To the best of my knowledge, Thelma Todd was never even in the house.”

“I thought Totie Fields owned it,” said Philip.

“Oh, later. That was much later,” said Willard, dismissing Totie Fields’s contribution to the house.

Philip felt that this was not the reason the butler had called him back.

“As I said, it doesn’t matter a bit,” said the butler.

“Interesting, though. I’m sorry, but I can’t remember your name.”

“Willard.”

“Oh, right, Willard. Do you have to clean all those wigs when you’re not cleaning the silver?”

Willard gasped. “You saw Mr. Stieglitz’s toupees? He’ll die, absolutely die. He thinks nobody knows he wears a rug.”

“I won’t tell.”

“I saw you at Hector Paradiso’s funeral.”

“You do get around, Willard.”

“Terrible thing.”

“Was Hector a friend of yours?”

“ ‘Acquaintance’ would be a better word.”

“Suicide, they say it was,” said Philip.

“You don’t believe that, do you, Mr. Quennell?”

“That’s what they say, even in the autopsy report,” said Philip.

Willard looked back toward the house. “I better get back. Mr. Stieglitz will wonder what’s happened to me.”

“I think Ina Rae and Darlene are taking pretty good care of Mr. Stieglitz by now, although they forgot the dildos,” said Philip.

“Aren’t they the two cheapest?” asked Willard, shaking his head in disapproval.

Philip turned on the ignition. “I’ll remember that about Gloria Swanson and Constance Bennett,” he said.

Suddenly, Willard started to talk very rapidly. “Did you ever hear of a bar called Miss Garbo’s?” he asked.

“No,” replied Philip, although it was the same bar that Flo had mentioned to him at the AA meeting.

“On Astopovo, between Santa Monica and Melrose?”

Philip shook his head.

“Not exactly on your beat, I wouldn’t imagine.”

“What kind of a bar?”

“The kind of bar that after midnight caters to gentlemen of a certain age, looking for, uh, companionship, for, uh, a price.”

“I see. Why are you telling me this?”

“Hector Paradiso was there on his way home from Pauline Mendelson’s party.”

“I thought Hector Paradiso was a great ladies’ man,” said Philip.

“Hector Paradiso was as gay as pink ink, Mr. Quennell,” said Willard.

“How do you know he was at Miss Garbo’s that night?” asked Philip.

“I was there myself that night,” said Willard. “I saw him. I even talked to him. Joel Zircon, the Hollywood agent who works for Mona Berg, introduced me to him.”

“How can you be sure it was the same night?”

“He was in a dinner jacket. He’d been to Pauline Mendelson’s party. He said Pauline was wearing black velvet and pearls and looked like Madame X, in the Sargent picture.”

“Hector said that?”

“Yes.”

“To you?”

“To Manning Einsdorf.”

“Who’s Manning Einsdorf?”

“Owns the place. He was at the funeral too. Gray hair combed in an upsweep?”

“Willard!” came a voice from the house.

Willard, jumping to attention, turned and started back toward the house. Then he turned back to Philip and spoke very quickly. “Hector left with a blond about two in the morning. I saw him.”

“A blond? Like Darlene?”

“A boy blond, called Lonny.”

With the exception of some personal bequests, written by hand on blue stationery from Smythsons in London, Hector Paradiso had died intestate. “Typical,” said Jules Mendelson, shaking his head in exasperation, when this information was passed on to him. Hector, everyone knew, was never one for business. In his personal bequests, which were neither notarized nor witnessed, he left his Paradiso family silver service to Camilla Ebury, his Flora Danica china to Pauline Mendelson, his dog, named Astrid, after the skating star he had once been engaged to, to Rose Cliveden, and a thousand dollars to Raymundo, his houseboy. “If that’s not a fruit’s will, I never saw one,” said Jules to Sims Lord, the attorney who handled all of Jules’s business affairs, as he tossed the blue notepaper on Sims’s desk. It was Pauline who had suggested to Jules that it might be a nice gesture if Sims Lord would step in and
handle the disposition of Hector’s estate, such as it was, and expedite matters so that everything could be brought to a conclusion as soon as possible.

In the days that followed, Sims Lord had a telephone call from a woman named Mercedes Sandoval, who pronounced her first name Mer
the
des, in the Castilian manner. She had done part-time secretarial work for Hector for years, such as writing out his party invitations, paying his bills, and balancing his checkbook. Mercedes told Sims Lord that a check had come in written by Hector on the night of his death and cashed the next day. The check was made out to someone Mercedes had never heard of before called Lonny Edge.

“Should I send it over to the police?” asked Mercedes.

“Send it over to me,” said Sims Lord. “I’ll see that it gets to the police.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Lord. I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

Flo’s Tape #8

“I don’t know if I actually thought of it at the time, but the more I think of it now, of everything that happened, Jules started to grow old right in front of my eyes. There were an awful lot of things that were coming down on him, all at the same time. But I didn’t know that. I was bugging him too, about buying me a house, but I realize now he had other things on his mind. When Jules was young, he was in a big jam in Chicago in 1953, I think it was. I don’t want to besmirch his memory, although I guess it’s pretty besmirched anyway, because of the way he died, but it’s an important part of the story. There was a girl he took to a hotel. It was the Roosevelt Hotel, I remember that. She wasn’t a hooker or anything like that, but she was a kind of low-class girl he picked up in a bar. Like me, I suppose. What you have to understand about Jules is that he was a very sexually oriented man, even though he wasn’t a sexy-looking man. The girl got frightened of him. He had a dick like a mule’s. Have I told you that? I think I did. Anyway, the girl ran out on the balcony of the hotel, and he grabbed her by the arm to bring her back in and, somehow, her arm got broken, and somehow she went over the balcony. Everything was hushed up. Jules’s family paid through the nose. The girl’s family was taken care of. There was never any record of it. But Arnie Zwillman knew. And Arnie Zwillman blackmailed him.”

W
hen Camilla Ebury asked Pauline Mendelson a few days later if Kippie would be available as a fourth for a few sets of mixed doubles—“I told Philip that Kippie has the best backhand ever,” Camilla said—Pauline informed Camilla that Kippie had returned to France, to the drug rehab in Lyons that had been so highly recommended by the headmaster at Le Rosay, the school in Switzerland that had expelled Kippie twice, even after Jules Mendelson had offered to build a new library for it in Gstaad. Pauline seemed to be her old self again, less tense when Kippie’s name was mentioned, and Camilla ventured to ask a few questions about him, between backgammon games.

“I thought perhaps he’d finished there, in Lyons,” she said.

“Oh, no. He has to stay another three months, at least. It’s part of the program,” said Pauline.

“Why was he home then?” asked Camilla.

“To see the dentist. He dislodged a front tooth somehow. An altercation, I would think, but he was very noncommittal. You know what he’s like. And he simply refused to go to one of those French dentists, especially in Lyons, and I don’t blame him a bit. Dr. Shea saw him for a few appointments, implanted a new tooth, you could never tell. And then he went back.”

“How was he?”

“Oh, you know Kippie. Utterly enchanting. Blondell spoils him rotten. The cook loves him, made him mashed potatoes and chicken hash, and all the kinds of things he could eat with a missing tooth. The butler couldn’t do enough for him. Jules and he are forever at odds with each other. That’s a given. And I try to be the peacemaker in the middle.” For an
instant she was silent, and then she added, “But he seems to be behaving. He even seemed quite anxious to get back to France, which came as a complete surprise.”

“What will he do when he gets out of the rehab?” asked Camilla.

“He’s thinking of opening a restaurant, can you imagine? At least, that’s this week’s scheme.”

They went back to their backgammon.

A week before, on the night of the Mendelsons’ party, Kippie Petworth had telephoned his mother to tell her he was back in Los Angeles. The news came as a complete surprise to her. Pauline was listening to the former President, who was seated on her right, tell a long anecdote about a verbal altercation between his wife and the wife of the Soviet leader, which Pauline had heard several times before, when her butler, Dudley, came to fetch her. With both elbows on the table, she gracefully cupped her chin with one hand and gave her distinguished guest her full attention, as if she were hearing the tale for the first time, and smiled and laughed at the appropriate moments. She held her hand up to caution the butler not to interrupt until the former President had arrived at his punch line.

“It’s really too funny,” she said at the end of the story, laughing heartily with the other guests. The President’s story caused the convivial laughter accorded to a distinguished man, although the same story, if told by a lesser individual, would have gone unremarked upon or unlaughed at. She then turned to Dudley to hear his message, expecting him to tell her of a crisis in the kitchen, or a problem with the band that had arrived to play for dancing.

“It’s Kippie,” said Dudley, whispering in her ear.

“Kippie?” she asked, turning to Dudley. There was astonishment in her voice, although even the person sitting on the other side of her, Sims Lord, her husband’s lawyer, was not aware from her voice that a possible family crisis was at hand.

“On the telephone,” whispered Dudley. “I told him you were having a party, but he insisted on speaking to you.”

“Is he calling from France?”

“I don’t think so. I think he’s here,” answered Dudley.

“Would you excuse me, Mr. President,” said Pauline,
placing her damask napkin on the table and rising. “There seems to be a slight soufflé problem in the kitchen.”

“Woman’s work is never done,” said the President, and everyone laughed appreciatively at his joke.

“I’ll send Rose Cliveden over here to keep my seat warm,” said Pauline. With that, she was off. “I’ll go into the library, Dudley. Will you stand outside the door and make sure no one comes in?” Several guests waylaid her on her way through the atrium to the library, and she returned each greeting or salute charmingly but never stopped moving. “What a marvelous dress that is,” she said to Madge White, whose daughter her son had impregnated when they were both fourteen years old. “Thank you, Sandy. I’m glad you’re having a good time,” she said to Sandy Pond, whose family owned the
Los Angeles Tribunal
. “Faye, if there’s a line for the powder room, use my bathroom upstairs. Blondell will let you in,” she said to Faye Converse.