1958 - Not Safe to be Free (3 page)

“There’s a curtain cord missing,” she said.

“How observant you are I” he said and pulled from his hip pocket the scarlet cord. “You mean this? I forgot to put it back. I’ve been amusing myself with it.”

She didn’t know why, but this remark had an oddly sinister sound.

“What do you mean?” she asked sharply.

“Oh, nothing. I was bored. I was just fooling with it.”

He began to move slowly and deliberately across the room towards her. The scarlet cord hung limply in his hands and it formed a noose.

There was something about his silent approach that suddenly alarmed her. It seemed stealthy and somehow threatening.

She moved away from the window, her heart beating fast and she stepped around the table that stood in the middle of the room so that it was between him and her.

Jay paused, looking at her across the table, the cord still held in a loop between his slim brown fingers.

Sophia realized that she was beginning to be frightened. She felt instinctively that something had happened in this room. The smell of the unfamiliar perfume, the scratches on Jay’s arm, the loop made by the curtain cord formed a pattern that she couldn’t bring herself to analyse. She wanted now badly to run out of the room, but she controlled the impulse. This was absurd, she told herself. Nothing had happened. Why should she be suddenly afraid of Floyd’s son? She forced herself to remain where she was, aware that her heart was now thumping and she was slightly breathless.

“Jay—have you brought a girl up here?” she demanded and she was surprised to hear how harsh her voice sounded.

Jay released one end of the cord and let it swing like a scarlet pendulum. He continued to stare at her.

“Did you hear me?” she said, raising her voice.

“How did you guess?” he said. He waved his hand towards his bedroom door. “You are quite right. As a matter of fact—she’s in there now.”

Chapter Two

I

T
here had been a time when Joe Kerr had been considered by editors and agents as a top-flight journalist: probably the best in the game.

There had been a time when Joe could call his agent, tell him he was going over to London or Paris or Rome or wherever it was to cover some special event, and, within the hour, his agent had sold the article, sight unseen and had also got a generous expense allocation to cover the cost of the trip.

At that time Joe could not only write brilliantly but he was also a class photographer and that made a very lucrative combination.

He reached the peak of his success in 1953. He not only had a book chosen by the Atlantic Book of the Month Club, but he also had a profile running for three weeks in the

New Yorker and Life had given a five-page spread to his remarkable photographs of the birth of a baby. But the highlight of that year for him was his marriage with a nice but thoroughly ordinary girl, whose name was Martha Jones.

Martha and he set up home at Malvern, which was a little over an hour’s run from Philadelphia, Joe’s working headquarters. Married life agreed with Joe. Martha and he were as happy together as two people really in love can be happy. Then something happened that was to alter completely the rhythm of Joe’s life.

One night coming back from a rather wild party, Joe, not exactly drunk, but certainly fuddled, accidentally killed his wife.

They had driven back to their home in Joe’s Cadillac, with Joe driving. He knew he was a little high and he had driven the thirty odd miles with extreme care. He was carrying with him his most precious possession and he wasn’t going to put her in the slightest danger just because he had had one whisky too many and was a little dizzy in the head.

They arrived home without incident and Martha got out of the car to open the garage doors while Joe slid the automatic gear into reverse and had his foot on the brake pedal.

As Martha was about to open the garage doors, Joe’s foot slipped off the pedal and the car began to move backwards. Fuddled and realizing Martha was directly behind the car, Joe stamped down hard on the brake pedal, missed it and his foot descended on the accelerator.

The massive car swept back at a speed that made it impossible for Martha to jump clear.

She was smashed against the garage doors and, with the splintered and broken doors, hurled into the garage and crushed against the back brick wall.

Joe never recovered from this experience. From the moment he got out of the car and ran to the lifeless body of his wife, he began to go downhill.

He began to drink. He lost his touch and editors soon discovered he could no longer be relied on. After a while, the assignments didn’t come to him and the articles he wrote lost their bite and didn’t sell.

Anyone knowing him in 1953 wouldn’t have recognized him as he shambled up the drive of the Plaza hotel after his brief conversation with Jay Delaney when he had hopefully asked if Jay could arrange an interview for him with Jay’s father.

Joe Kerr was a tall, thin man who looked a lot older than his forty odd years. He stooped as he walked and he was always a little short of breath. His hair, the colour of sand, was thin and lank, but it was his raddled plum-coloured face that shocked people meeting him for the first time.

Since the death of his wife, he had been drinking two bottles of whisky a day and his face was now a mass of tiny broken veins. With his ruined face, his watery frog’s eyes and his shabby clothes, he looked beaten and broken and people moved out of his way when he approached them.

Somehow, he still managed to scrape up a living. He was now employed by a Hollywood scandal sheet called Peep that paid him enough to buy his drink and the bare necessities.

Peep had a large circulation. It specialized in near-pornographic photographs and an outrageous gossip column. In his heyday, Joe wouldn’t have dreamed of contributing to such a paper, no matter what he had been offered. Now he was thankful to do so.

As he walked into the Plaza lobby, his Rolliflex camera hanging around his neck and bumping against his chest, Joe was thinking of the letter he had had that morning from

Manley, the Editor of Peep. Manley hadn’t pulled his punches. If Joe imagined he had paid his fare to Cannes to get the insipid junk that Joe was turning in, Joe had another think coming.

“How many more times do I have to tell you that we have got to have something that’ll stand our readers on their ears?” Manley wrote. “Cannes is a cesspit: everyone knows that. The dirt’s there. If you’ll only lay off the booze and dig for it, you’ll find it. If you can’t find it, then say so and I’ll wire Jack Bernstein to take over.”

This letter had shaken Joe’s nerves. He knew no other paper would employ him and if Manley dropped him, he might just as well walk into the sea and keep on walking. Ever since Floyd Delaney had arrived in Cannes, Joe had been desperately trying to get a personal interview with him.

Floyd Delaney was the most colourful character at the Festival and Joe hoped that, if he could get him talking, he could trap him into saying something indiscreet. He had worried Harry Stone, Delaney’s publicity manager, to get him an interview, but Stone had been brutally frank.

“If you imagine F.D. wants to talk to a rumdum like you Joe,” he said, “you must be out of your mind. That pickle puss of yours would give him a nightmare.”

Joe’s drink-sodden mind glowed with resentment when he remembered Stone’s words. If he could only dig up some dirt on Delaney, he was thinking, something really hot with photographs, maybe the snoot wouldn’t be quite so sensitive about how a man looked if his own face was turning red.

It was a quarter to four when Joe took up his position in an alcove window that gave him an uninterrupted view of the door to suite 27. He was out of sight of anyone going into the suite and also out of sight of the occasional waiter who passed up and down the corridor.

He sat on the window seat, his Rolliflex at the ready, satisfied that there was enough light in the corridor to get good pictures without using his flash equipment.

He had had four double whiskies since two o’clock and his mind was a little fuddled. He wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, for he knew Delaney and his high-hat wife were in the cinema and they wouldn’t be out much before six o’clock. He had seen Delaney’s good-looking son sunning himself on the beach and he looked set to remain there some time. So, on the face of it, Joe was wasting his time sitting outside this door. Nothing seemed likely to happen in suite 27 until around six o’clock, and, even then, the chances of anything of value to Joe happening was remote.

But that didn’t bother Joe. It simply supplied him with an excuse to sit still for a while and to get away from the mad crush downstairs.

The Cannes Festival had exhausted him. The competition had been unbelievably fierce. Joe felt old and washed-up when jostling with the other photographers for position when some famous star condescended to pose for a very brief moment to allow the photographers to go into action.

These photographers were young men, smart in their Riviera clothes, with hands that were rock steady and their ruthless keenness dazed Joe. His drink-fuddled mind made him clumsy with his camera and he had trouble in keeping it steady. They jostled him to the back of the crowd, yelling at him: “Get the hell out of the way, grandpa! Let a man work!”

At five minutes to four by the corridor clock immediately above the door to suite 27, Joe snapped out of a doze and peered down the corridor. He saw Jay Delaney come down the corridor and pause outside the door to suite 27.

Without thinking much about what he was doing, Joe lifted the Rolliflex, glanced quickly into the viewfinder, adjusted the focus and then gently pressed the shutter release. He had already set the aperture and he was satisfied that he had taken a printable picture should Manley want to print a picture of Floyd Delaney’s son which, Joe knew, was extremely unlikely.

He shifted on the window seat as he watched Jay unlock the door and disappear into the suite. Joe shrugged and groped for the half-pint bottle of whisky he always carried around with him in his hip pocket. He took a long pull, sighed and put the bottle away. He was just beginning to wonder if he should waste any more time outside this door when he saw a girl coming down the corridor.

He recognized her immediately. She was the up-and-coming French starlette, Lucille Balu, in a blue and white off-the-shoulder dress and a string of fat blue beads around her lovely brown throat.

Automatically, Joe wound on a new strip of film, wondering what she was doing on this floor reserved for film executives only. He felt a tiny prickle of excitement as she paused outside the door of suite 27.

He lifted his camera as she raised her hand to knock on the door and the shutter clicked as she rapped. As he lowered the camera, he thought the right caption to that picture should be: Opportunity Knocks. Lucille Balu, the French starlette, knocks on the door of Floyd Delaney’s luxury suite at the Plaza hotel. Is this the beginning of a Hollywood career for this talented young beginner? Not the kind of material Manley was looking for, of course, but there was a chance he might sell the picture to some other rag.

He watched the door open and Jay appear in the doorway.

He heard Jay say, “How wonderfully punctual! Come on in. My father’s waiting to meet you.”

He watched the girl enter and the door close.

It took several seconds for Jay’s words to sink into Joe’s fuddled mind.

My father’s waiting to meet you.

That couldn’t be right. Floyd Delaney was at the cinema. Joe had seen him with his wife walking up the steps leading to the cinema and he knew they wouldn’t be back until at least six o’clock.

Joe ran his fingers through his thinning hair.

What did this mean?

He remembered Jay Delaney had asked him who the girl was and he suddenly stiffened to attention. Was there more to this good-looking, pleasantly mannered youngster than he had imagined?

Joe had already noticed that Jay seemed to live a pretty solitary life. He had noticed, too, that he spent his days alone sitting on the beach, reading and kept away from the fun and games that made the drudgery of the Festival worthwhile.

Had this boy tricked the girl into coming to the suite on the pretext that his father wanted to see her? Any ambitious starlette would jump at the chance of meeting Floyd Delaney.

Was the boy going to attempt to seduce her?

Joe broke out in a hot sweat of excitement. Suppose he did and she screamed for help: that would give him the right to burst in there with his camera. He might even catch them struggling together: the girl with her clothes up around her neck! How Manley would eat a picture like that! It would wipe out all Joe’s past mistakes! He would be in solid with Manley for life!

He leaned forward and listened, but he couldn’t hear anything.

Then just as he was about to leave his hiding place and go and listen at the door, he saw Sophia Delaney coming briskly down the corridor.

For a moment he couldn’t believe his eyes. His run of bad luck had been so consistent that he couldn’t believe he was getting a break and what a break!

Stepson lures starlette up to Papa’s luxury suite, then, at the psychological moment, stepmother arrives! It was the kind of stuff Peep lived on!

Joe lifted his camera as Sophia knocked on the door.

II

A
s Jay swung the scarlet cord, he saw Sophia follow each swing. He felt very sure of himself. He had seen that he had frightened Sophia and he knew it wasn’t easy to frighten his father’s wife. He had also seen that he had disconcerted her by his barefaced admission that he had brought a girl to the suite.

I had better not overdo it, he thought. I’d now better begin to reassure her. I mustn’t let her imagine that there is anything seriously wrong. I had her worked up just now so badly she looked as if she were going to bolt out of the room. She must be very sensitive to atmosphere. I wonder how she guessed about the girl. Maybe it was the perfume. Women notice things like that. The girl had been overscented.