Authors: Hugh Pentecost
She relaxed a little and I saw the dark shadows of exhaustion under her eyes.
“I’m really very grateful,” she said.
I put down the tray, poured her a drink, and handed her the glass.
“Please join me,” she said.
I poured one for myself.
“I really couldn’t eat any dinner,” she said, nodding toward the large menu.
“Camouflage,” I said. “I had to have a reason for coming in.” I offered her a cigarette and she let me light it for her.
“I know Chambrun’s trying to make things as easy for me as he can,” she said. “You know that I’m a prisoner, though I haven’t been arrested?”
“Yes. That’s why the drink and the menu. You’re not denied hotel service. But my real reason for being here is that I have a message for you. Gary Craig is in my quarters on the fourth floor. He wants you to know that he’s here and ready to do anything on earth he can to help you.”
I thought she was going to drop the martini glass. Then she reached out with her free hand to steady herself on the table.
“Is the story out—in the papers and on radio and television?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Then how did he know?”
“He’s been waiting here every day for you to show up,” I said. “Ever since you called him two weeks ago.”
She stared at me as though I’d said something in Arabic. “I called him?” she asked. It was almost a whisper.
“The twenty-eighth of February,” I said.
She turned away from me and took an unsteady step toward a chair. She sat down. I could see her shoulders trembling. If it was an act, it was superb.
“You don’t remember calling him?” I asked.
She shook her bright-red head without speaking.
“You asked him to be here the next day—March first—for breakfast. You told him you were in trouble.”
“Oh, God!” she said, softly.
“You honestly don’t remember?”
She turned, abruptly, her gray-green eyes bright with tears that wouldn’t flow. “Can you remotely imagine what it’s like not to remember, Haskell?”
It was hard to imagine.
“What do you want me to tell Craig?” I asked her.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Does he know that—that I can’t remember the last three weeks?”
“He knows.”
“Then tell him that I don’t remember calling him,” she said. “That I don’t remember what the trouble was I said I was in then. That he can’t help me now and that all I want him to do is go away and forget about me.”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, he won’t,” I said.
“He must!”
“It’s none of my business, but why?” I asked. “He’s your friend—or isn’t he?”
“He—must—not—involve—himself—in—this!” she said, hammering out each word with a beat of her fist on the arm of the chair. “Tell him, Haskell! Tell him to go!”
“He won’t,” I said. I took a sip of my martini and waited.
“What has he told you about me?” she asked.
“That he intends to marry you,” I said, making it sound casual.
She looked at me, and despite the lacquer of sophistication—the Marinelli dress, the skillful coiffeur, the eye makeup, the bright-scarlet mouth, the platinum and diamond clip at the V-line of her dress that probably cost more than my annual salary—she was a wistful little child for a moment. Then her face hardened.
“Tell him for me that he’s an idiot,” she said.
“He mentioned the need to amputate you from your friends,” I said. “By the way, has anyone told you that they, too, are rallying round?”
“What do you mean?”
“Table for five in the Blue Lagoon tonight at eleven—in the name of Teague,” I said.
“But if, as you say, the story isn’t out, it must be a coincidence!” she said, and now she looked frightened.
“I said the story wasn’t in the papers or on the radio,” I said. “I didn’t say it hadn’t leaked. If you didn’t kill Jeremy Slade, Doris, then the person who did is walking around loose and could easily have passed the word to Teague in California. Teague had plenty of time to make a jet flight that will get him here to the hotel by eleven.”
“Is there a little more in that shaker?” she asked, holding out her empty martini glass.
I filled it for her. Two little feverish spots had appeared beside her high cheekbones. I had the sudden feeling that she was trying to see some way out of a trap. You understand, I wasn’t investigating this case, but while she seemed willing to talk a little I thought I should encourage it.
“I’m sure Craig will do anything you ask him—except desert you,” I said, when she didn’t speak.
She stared at me over the rim of her glass, sipping at her drink.
“You seem like a nice guy,” she said, finally. “You want to help.”
“Without breaking too many laws,” I said, hoping a mild crack would loosen her up a litüe.
“Then use your energies to help someone decent,” she said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Gary. Get him out of here—away—anywhere! And then stay out of it yourself. You’re the kind who has a nice girl somewhere. Go to her and thank God she isn’t someone like me.”
“Melodrama,” I said.
“I wish it was. Do you know anything about amnesia, Haskell?”
“Mostly what I’ve read in suspense novels,” I said. “It’s usually a plot convenience for the author. It’s a nice way to hide a secret from a reader.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” she said with a touch of impatience, “a way to hide a secret. A mechanism of the mind that helps you to forget something intolerable. That’s what’s happened to me, a reasonably intelligent girl. There’s something I can’t bear to remember.”
“And you really don’t know what it is?”
“I’ve been running for a long time,” she said. “But there was no place to run, so finally the mental machinery has taken over.”
“I still say melodrama.”
She got up from her chair and began to walk restlessly around the room, twisting from side to side as if something hurt her. I suddenly felt like an intruder, an involuntary Peeping Tom. But before I could tell her to-hell-with-it as far as I was concerned, it began to spill out of her.
“Some people are unwillingly involved in situations that are completely unfamiliar to most other people. My situation involves money, Haskell. I was an only child, and I grew up in a world you probably can’t imagine. My grandparents were native Californians. My grandfather ran a modest truck farm not far from where Hollywood is today. I don’t suppose at the end of a year he had a thousand dollars’ profit to show for his work. But somehow he managed to save something, and just before World War I he put what he had saved into something called ‘moving pictures.’ Before you could say Mary Pickford he was suddenly a moderately rich man. He bought some property along the way, and when Hollywood began to grow into a city he owned a handsome piece of it. He was making money hand over fist, but until the day he died he didn’t believe the movies would ‘last.’ Property—land—was the only thing he really believed in. He sent my father looking for interesting buys, and Dad wound up purchasing a chunk of Texas. There turned out to be so much oil on the Texas property that I guess by the time I was born in 1940, Dad couldn’t even guess how rich he was. Just for fun there was the house in Beverly Hills, and a model ranch in Texas, and a kind of hunting lodge in the Adirondacks, and a beautiful house outside Paris that was eventually bombed into rubble during the war, and yachts, and planes, and anything you woke up in the morning with a whim to buy.
“When I was eighteen my mother died. My father went a year later. He couldn’t buy anything to fill up his loneliness, or cure a lung cancer. So there I was, the second-richest girl in the world, perhaps, with houses and cars and boats and horses and God knows what, surrounded by bankers and lawyers, and an army of men, young and old, who told me I was beautiful and desirable, and each time one of them looked at me I could see the dollar signs in their eyes, like the wolf in a Disney cartoon. It’s funny, but nice guys shied away from me because they saw the money as an obstacle. Only the heels danced attendance. They make a joke out of the phrase ‘poor little rich girl.’ Don’t you believe it, Haskell. It’s hell.”
“I told Craig you could buy the best help there is,” I said, when she didn’t go on. “He said you couldn’t buy love, or tenderness, or sympathy.”
“He said that?”
“Sounded like he meant it,” I said.
“You can’t love anyone because they see you in an impossible frame of reference,” she said. “Deep down you know that everyone wants to steal from you: your banker, your lawyer, your estate manager, the people you buy from, the bellboy who holds out his hand for a tip, your friends, who begin to feel that they’re entitled to part of what you have—because they don’t see why you should have it and not them. You can’t ever help anybody—enough! You’re ripe for picking! I’m telling you this miserable sob story, Haskell, so you’ll understand what happened to me.”
“Small dividend?” I asked, holding out the shaker.
She ignored the question. “At a certain level, wealth is relative,” she said. “I suspect I have a great deal more money than Emlyn Teague, but he has so much that you couldn’t tell the difference when it comes to being able to acquire anything on earth you want. I met Emlyn at a party somewhere. He’s not unattractive in a weird way. His story isn’t unlike mine. Like Gary said to you, he was in the position of being able to buy almost anything but love, or tenderness, or sympathy. The first night we met we had a kind of funny, gay time together. I remember he took me home, very early in the morning, from some night spot. On my doorstep—my gold-plated doorstep—he said:
“ ‘Do you feel anything?’
“ ‘Like what?’ I asked him.
“ ‘Like a mad, irresistible desire to make love to me?’
“ ‘I wish I did,’ I told him. ‘It would be nice to make love to someone who wasn’t making a mental appraisal of the value of the silverware.’
“ ‘I wish I did,’ he said, ‘for the same reason. But that being settled, my pet, there’s no reason we can’t join forces in having some fun out of life.’ ”
“So we became friends, Haskell, for the curious reason that we knew neither one of us wanted anything from the other. I thought, at first, that he was a kind of joyful madman. He loved practical jokes. He’d go to endless pains and expense to make them come off. He made me laugh and I needed to laugh. Emlyn’s bosom friends were a little harder to learn to take—Jeremy, and Oscar, and Van, and Ivor. Their notion was that part of the joyful-madness department was a kind of free-love compact. They expected me to be like Bobby Towers, available whenever and wherever. You may not understand why I felt a little guilty that I couldn’t say ‘yes’ to everything. It was part of their way of life, and they were providing me with the first real fun I’d ever had, so I ought to have been willing. But I wasn’t. The result was that I tried to even things up by entering into Emlyn’s pranks and games with all the energy I had. I was the mad, mad, mad one of the lot. I’ve thrown more money away on crazy escapades than most people earn in a lifetime. It’s pretty incredible when you stop to think of it. And pretty soon nothing was quite gay enough or produced quite enough laughs. That’s when the quality of the games began to change—an element of sadism began to be part of them—before I realized it was happening. People were being really hurt; not laughed at, but hurt.”
“Like Julie Frazer,” I said.
She looked at me, her eyes very bright. I’d brought her up short, but I realized she’d been remembering with a kind of excitement. I felt just a little revolted.
“That was when it first began to go sour for me,” she said, her voice very low. “I’m not going into case histories with you, I can’t. But I wanted out. I went to Emlyn one night and told him I had had fun, but I was through. I wasn’t getting kicks out of it anymore. I was beginning to feel like a heel. Mind you, Haskell, I should have long ago, but I hadn’t.
“ ‘You can’t quit, my pet,’ Emlyn told me. ‘You’re one of us. You’re in with us up to your pretty neck.’
“ ‘I’ve had enough,’ I told him.
“ ‘But we need you,’ he said. ‘You’ve become our trademark.’
“I told him I was sorry, but I’d had it.
“Then he laid it on the line to me. I hadn’t stopped to think, but actually we were guilty of crimes—legal crimes. They’d been committed for laughs, but they were nonetheless punishable. No one in the group could quit. It wouldn’t be safe for the rest.
“ ‘You might turn next to religion,’ Emlyn said, with his evil little smile. ‘Where would we be if you took to confession for the good of your immortal soul—if any?’
“He’d kept a kind of log on all our activities for the last five years. He had each one of us hooked. I had to go on until I could find a way out. Presently, Emlyn came up with a new game. It involved—well, never mind what it involved. It topped anything we’d done before in malice. At the last minute I ran out on them. I had a little power boat at Santa Monica, and on a night I was supposed to be meeting the others, I took off in it. They wouldn’t be able to find me out on the ocean.
“When you’re running you don’t take ordinary precautions. I’ve handled small boats all my life. I’m good at it. But that night, in my anxiety to get away, I didn’t stop to check on weather conditions. It was a beautiful, moonlit night, but, actually, small-craft warnings were up. I’d only been out about an hour when I was hit by a violent windstorm. Before I knew it, I was fighting for my life—all through the longest night of my life. It was just daylight when I ran aground on a rock ledge. I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was, but I had to abandon the boat and try to swim for shore which was at least a mile away.
“I don’t remember making it. Oh, not a blackout, Haskell. Simple Exhaustion. I did manage to crawl up onto a stretch of rocky shoreline, and there I passed out.
“When I came to, I was in a bunk somewhere, warmly wrapped in blankets, and I could smell the delicious aroma of fresh coffee. And when I sat up I saw Gary, that inevitable pipe in his mouth, coming toward me with a steaming cup of coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. It turned out he had rented this little cabin on the beach. He’d gone out for an early morning walk and found me lying unconscious down at the high-tide line on the beach. He’d carried me to his cabin, dried me off, and left me to sleep it out. He introduced himself, and I knew who he was. I’d read his books. I told him I was ‘Dorothy Smith.’