The Bette Davis Club (11 page)

“Wait!” I say. They stop and turn to face me. “I’m not a reporter; I’m not even a fan.” Whoops.

The One Who Speaks sucks on her tongue as though it were a peppermint. “Yeah, we give lessons,” she says. “But they’re not cheap. That what you want to know?”

“Actually, I’m looking for someone. My niece, a redhead. I believe you had drinks with her earlier.”

“Her!” the One Who Speaks says. “You’re welcome to her! We both of us gave her a free lesson, no charge. She told us she writes for the movies, said her stepdad was an agent and her mom some big-time Hollywood producer. Billie and me have an idea for a film, about two female golfers on the pro circuit, based on me and Billie’s true-life experiences. We pitched the whole movie to her, right here in this bar. But she got so hammered on dreamy monkeys, she about passed out.”

Billie, who up to now has been silent, joins in. “After enough dreamy monkeys,” she says, “there was nothing dreamy about that young lady whatsoever. It was all ape.”

“Damned if we didn’t have to carry her to her room,” the One Who Speaks—Nevada—says.

“That would be room number—” I fish.

“That would be room number zero,” Nevada says tartly. “As in, if she’s really your niece, ask at the front desk. But no joke, that girl has attention deficit disorder. Definitely not good at keeping her eye on the little white ball.”

They both let out a hoot. Then they walk away from me for good.

I go back to my saddle, but don’t mount up. I stand there.

“Anything?” Tully asks of my encounter with the golf pros.

“Nothing,” I say.

At the far end of the lounge, there’s a wall of windows and a door that opens to the outside. Through the glass, you can see the swimming pool, the patio (crowded with women), and a large garden area.

Tully follows my gaze. “Let’s take a walk,” he says. “I’m pretty sure we’ve got time for that.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

SANCTUM SANCTORUM

T
ully and I start down a garden path shady with tall shrubs and low palms. The air is clean and fresh and smells vaguely of citrus. I pull my cigarettes and lighter from my bag. “Do you mind?” I say automatically.

“Yeah,” Tully says. “I do.”

I stop mid-light. Now he wants to keep me from smoking? Outside? He really is annoying, no wonder Georgia left him.

“But only,” he says, “because I hate seeing anybody do that to themselves.”

Oh. I see. Yes, I want to tell him, yes, I agree. I hate it when people hurt themselves. But what Tully doesn’t know is that at the moment I need to smoke and drink and do unhealthy things. It’s all that’s keeping me going.

So I light up. I inhale the tobacco, letting the nicotine do its work on my brain cells.

“Something’s been bothering me,” I say. “Charlotte claims when Georgia ran away she took things that belong to her. Belong to Charlotte, I mean. Do you know what they are?”

Tully chews his lip. “Money, jewelry, cocaine . . . who knows?”

“Georgia does coke?”

He laughs. “Georgia does whatever she wants. But yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that butler, Juven, brings her blow on a tray, with coffee and biscotti.” He gazes down at the ground. “Hollywood’s a funny place. And the Illworths are a very Hollywood family.”

“I don’t know if this is about drugs,” I say. “I hope not. But I do think whatever items Georgia took must be valuable, or Charlotte wouldn’t be so eager to get them back.”

“Well,” Tully says, “you know the old saying: ‘One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.’”

Perhaps. But Charlotte’s house overflows with high-end furnishings and artwork. It’s doubtful anything she perceived as treasure would be considered trash by someone else. Besides, didn’t Tully get that backward? I thought the saying was “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

We round a corner and come upon a lizard sunning itself on a rock. The animal’s wide mouth and thin legs remind me of Charlotte. I halfway expect it to pull out a phone and strike a deal with Warner Bros. The creature sees us and darts off into the undergrowth.

“Have you no other notion what these missing objects might be?” I say to Tully.

“Not a clue. But you think they’re valuable?”

“Quite,” I say.

“Then, uh, I should point something out,” Tully says. “Every object actually has two values.” He holds up his index finger. “Number one is the price it’ll bring in the open market. What’ll people bid for it at Sotheby’s or Christie’s?” He holds up a second finger. “But every object also has a hidden value. That’s a wild card, totally unpredictable. Could be zero, could be millions.”

“And what is this mysterious hidden value?” I say.

Tully smiles and for the first time today looks almost happy. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he says. “It’s part of the book I’m writing.”

“Dollhouses?” I take a drag off my cigarette.

“Sort of. The culture of collecting. See, the hidden value of any object is what that object is worth to you. Sentimentality can really drive up the price. Like when we were in that shop today and the guy was going on about his grandmother’s china and Ginger Rogers’s shoes and Marilyn Monroe’s underwear. That’s all schmaltz.”

“But surely some of that must have historic value,” I say. “History of the American cinema and all that.”

“What do Marilyn Monroe’s panties have to do with the annals of American film?” Tully says. “You tell me.”

I’d like to tell him. There must be historical importance to Marilyn Monroe’s panties, if only I could think what it would be. Wait a minute! What if they were the panties from that film
The Seven Year Itch
? The panties Marilyn takes out of the icebox and innocently waves under Tom Ewell’s nose? That was a classic scene of comic male frustration.

You could say in that film Marilyn’s panties were a metaphor for political repression in America during the 1950s, juxtaposed against the awakening sexual freedom of the middle class. Oh, that’s good, isn’t it? Those panties are of significant historical interest. Those panties should be in the Smithsonian!

But before I can make my case, Tully starts in again. “See, the hidden value can go way deeper than sentimental attachment. Sometimes you feel it down to your soul. Like maybe you’re the one person who appreciates a work of art that everybody else hates.”

He stops walking and squats down to examine a basketball-size plant growing in the ground. It’s a round, cactusy thing with milky-white spines.

“This thing you treasure,” Tully says, gazing at the cactus, “this thing nobody else wants, could also be what you’d call organic. It could be alive. Could be, I don’t know, a dog. Or a human being. That’s what falling in love is, isn’t it? Discovering the hidden value in someone.”

Tully reaches out and touches the cactus. It pricks him, and he jerks back his hand. He stands there and considers the spot of blood forming on his finger.

I stub out my cigarette under my shoe, then rummage in my bag for a tissue. “Here,” I say. Tully holds out his palm to me.

I lay the tissue against Tully’s finger. I’m pushing down, applying pressure to the wound, when I glance up and look at Tully’s face. I take in his smooth cheeks, his rough chin and jaw, the developing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

“We fall in love with somebody who maybe seems like a bad match,” Tully says, “and our friends run around saying, ‘What does he see in her?’ What he
sees
in her is what’s hidden from everyone else. He’s fallen in love with something invisible.”

“Or possibly he’s made a common mistake,” I say, gazing at Tully. “He was needy. He fell for outward appearances. He projected onto this person whatever it was he’d always longed for in a relationship, whatever he hungered for in life. He fell in love with the idea of love.”

“That’s a pretty cynical point of view,” Tully says. He pulls his hand away and removes the tissue, sucking at the cut on his finger. “Or do you speak from experience?”

The garden path circles round until it comes out by the hotel parking lot. The MG is there, parked in the shade of the building. Amid rows of more expensive luxury vehicles, my father’s car shines like a cherry in a bowl of vanilla ice-cream. Two women walk by. One of them pulls out a camera and directs the other to stand next to the MG. She snaps a photo. They laugh and move on.

“The car’s a photo-op,” Tully says.

“It has style,” I say.

“It does. Except style, like value, is a matter of opinion. That reminds me—those shoes in the shop, the ones that belonged to Ginger Rogers. How’d you know who designed them?”

“Oh, well,” I say. “Roger Vivier was French, he created women’s high-fashion mid-century footwear. If you know his work, it’s not hard to spot.”

“Still, that was pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Of course, I also saw the label.”

There’s a beat, then Tully gives a short laugh. I laugh too.

We walk over to the MG. It’s sleek and inviting, and has an air of speed even when it’s standing still. Despite having spent much of the day in that car, I have an urge to sit in it. I turn the chrome handle on the driver’s side and get in.

I perch in the driver’s seat, my fingers wrapped round the steering wheel. The red dashboard in front of me is curved like a pair of lips. In the center of the dashboard are three old-fashioned instrument dials. They have octagonal-shaped black faces and white numbers and pointers. There’s nothing at all digital or electronic or modern about this car. A time machine, yes, that’s what it is. Finn would have liked it. I like it. I like being in it, imagining the places I could go. Home, mostly.

Tully rests against the hood, facing me. He talks over the windshield. “Look, Margo,” he says, “you want to find Georgia and Charlotte’s stuff, whatever that is. Me, I just want to find Georgia. How about we try to get along? Seriously, I’m not a bad guy. We could, you know, join forces.”

I gaze at Tully, trying to figure him out. On the plus side: attractive smile, nice head of hair. But the rest of him? Fortyish, dumped on his wedding day, writing a little book about dollhouses. Frankly, I feel sorry for him.

“Well,” I say, “Georgia’s my niece, but the sole reason I’m pursuing her is because Charlotte’s paying me. I need money. I’m broke. What about you?”

“I make a living.”

“No, no. Why did you get in this car and come after Georgia?”

“Oh.” Tully pokes his thumbnail into the rubber coating along the edge of the windscreen. “Well, I’m in love with her. She’s young, I know. And we had a huge fight yesterday. Gigantic. I told her I was sick of all the partying. I want her to dry out, ditch the drugs, grow up. That pissed her off. She threw stuff around, said nobody could put her on a leash.”

“All right,” I say. “You argued; she bolted. But on her way out the front door she paused long enough to nick two or three items belonging to Charlotte. Again, what do you imagine those objects are?”

“Who knows? The only thing out of the ordinary I know for sure happened is Georgia got into a room over the garage. When Charlotte found that out she was ticked. Nobody’s supposed to go up there.”

A dim memory floats back to me from childhood. Before I can even think what it is I want to ask, I say, “The sanctum sanctorum.”

Tully waits, as if there must be more.

“It’s Latin,” I say. “It means—”

“Innermost sanctuary.”

“Yes. Remember that actor John Barrymore? Drew Barrymore’s grandfather?”

Tully lets loose a laugh. “Before my time. But I bet the two of you rode around in this car every day, eating ice-cream.”

“He died before I was born,” I say. “But my father knew him. Barrymore was a legendary drunk. He kept a room, a private bar, in the attic of his Beverly Hills home. He called it his sanctum sanctorum. When my father bought the house at Malibu, he had his own sanctum sanctorum built over the garage. It was his private clubhouse, but it was also his office. If Georgia took something from that room it was almost certainly, even after all these years, an item that belonged to my father.”

This starts me thinking about what Charlotte said, how Irene kept all of our father’s things. However, as much as I loved my dad, the only item of interest I can picture him leaving behind, other than the MG, is a bottle of good Napoleon brandy. Besides, whether or not Georgia filched something from the sanctum sanctorum is of minor importance. To get my fifty thousand dollars, I first of all have to find her.

I need to know more, but I’m aware of not wanting to hurt Tully. I suspect he’s been hurt enough. “Do you think it’s possible,” I say gently, “that Georgia might have, well . . . any chance she ran off with someone else?”

Tully pokes some more at the rubber coating. “I thought of that. But if she was with a guy, she probably wouldn’t need cash, meaning she wouldn’t have hocked her dress so fast. Jilting me was a prank. She wanted to hurt me, and she did. Plus, she gets a kick out of driving her mom crazy.”

He looks straight at me. “Georgia’s wild, yeah. Immature as hell. But she’d never
really
leave me without . . . It’s a stunt. She said she loved me.”