All That Glitters (57 page)

“Who killed her? How did she die?”

“A lot you care.”

“She’s my mother! My mother!”

“Well, she didn’t die—though she damn well could have. And you did it!”

“I
didn’t
! You’re wrong—I haven’t even been home since yesterday and I can prove it.”

“Maybe you can, but it won’t matter. I have proof that you and your cone-head boyfriend out there poisoned your mother. They’re going to call it attempted manslaughter. You’ll each get five to ten, easy.”

She ran at me, began frantically pummeling my chest. “You’re crazy crazy crazy! You shouldn’t say such things! I never poisoned anybody! I don’t know anything about any poisons! You’re crazy!”

Bobby appeared in the room, touching his lip, which was bleeding, and he seemed groggier than ever. “Hey,
man
, what’re you talkin’, anyways?”

“You heard me,
man
!”

His look was venomous. “I can get you charged with fuckin’ slander, man, fuckin’ perjury. My father’s Ed Spurling, y’know that?—you ever heard of E. J. Spurling? Made
The Girl in the Polka Dot Bikini
? He’s a big man in Beverly Hills, he’ll step all over you.” His jutting jaw made a neat target and I longed to punch it, but I restrained myself.

“Maybe. But I wonder what you’ll say when I tell you I can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that you, Mr. Bobby Spurling, and you, Little Miss Daisy Duck, yesterday morning purchased a fifth of Polish vodka at the Sunset Liquor Store and brought it into this house.”

Bobby stuck his hands on his hips and hung his face out at me. “Yeah? Since when is that against the law?”

“Moreover, I can prove that you did it with the sole malicious purpose of getting your mother to drink it, and drink it at the peril of her life.” I swung my look on Faun. “Your mother is an alcoholic and you know damn well that for her any alcohol is a toxic substance.”

“You’re crazy! We bought it for ourselves!” Bobby screamed. He was terror-stricken and had tears in his eyes.

I turned on him again. “No, you didn’t. You bought that bottle and left it out on the sinkboard, right under the cabinet where Faun’s mother keeps her tea things—you put it there knowing she’d be bound to find it. You left it in a champagne bucket with ice, knowing that was how she liked it, ice cold. You even took the trouble to open it. Just in case she mightn’t bother.”

“Liar! Liar! Liar!” Bobby was screaming. “You’re trying to frame us.”

“Bobby—shut the fuck
up
!” Faun was a tiger now. “What happened—are you telling me she’s dead, then?”

“She’s had a very serious accident. She nearly bled to death. She walked through a plate-glass window. Go look in the studio if you want to.”

“Oh Jesus! Jesus!” Bobby was shouting, spitting venom, the white spittle from his lips. “You scared the shit out of me. I thought she was dead!”

With a roar he jumped me from behind and tried to bear me to the floor. I whipped my shoulders around and shrugged him off, but before I could attack, Faun had grabbed my arms and swung her body between me and Bobby. I lashed out with my foot, the only way I could get at him, and caught him smack in the nuts. As he flopped over in pain, I shoved Faun aside, then dragged Bobby across the hall and out the front door, where I dumped him on the stoop.

“All right, Funny Face, you’re out of here.” I went back inside and slammed the door. I locked it, turned out the front lights, and ran back to the Snuggery. Faun was collapsed in a chair, sobbing into her hands.

“All right, Miss Blue-Bitch, you can turn off the waterworks now,” I told her. “I’m not interested. You’re acting’s every bit as lousy as it was last month, so can it. What I want to know from you, now that Jo-Jo’s incapacitated, is—whose idea was it? I mean, did you think it up or did he?” She’d gone all white-faced and was biting her lip hard. “Well, damn it,
did
he?”

“Stop it! Stop saying that! I didn’t try to murder her! I can buy a bottle if I want to, can’t I? I’m over twenty-one. You haven’t got a thing on me! Now I’m going out to Bobby.”

But Bobby had apparently found the good sense to get lost; we heard the screech as his car went tearing across the gravel and through the front gates. As Faun started to dash after him, I held her forcibly by the wrist, and we tugged at each other until Ling appeared in the doorway, with Maude, white-faced, behind him. Faun began to sob and wail, then she sagged and among us, we helped her to her quarters in the Playhouse. The room was chilly, there was only the porcelain stove in one corner and neither Ling nor I could get it started, so we covered her with an extra blanket. Maude got a couple of Tuinals into her, and when she’d subsided, we tiptoed out. We went back to the Snuggery, talking quietly; then I left.

The next day I talked with the doctor, who assured Maude and me that Belinda would be all right, though she’d indeed had a narrow escape.

While by no means fatal, Belinda’s accident had given us all a very bad scare, a worse one to Frank, who again let business slide in order to stay close by in time of need. Angie drove up from the desert also, to be on hand during Belinda’s private recuperation—the sordid details of the accident were kept from the press, even friends (one paper reported she was in the hospital for a face lift, another claimed a full body retread). When the bandages came off and the stitches were taken out, she asked me to take her to an A.A. meeting. I’ll never forget her standing up in that church activities room and saying, “I’m Belinda Carroll and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for nineteen days.” Nineteen days, after her seven long years of hard-won, so-precious sobriety, and badly robbed of it by her vicious daughter and a dumb turd of a boyfriend.

But despite what might have been a real tragedy, despite the fall from grace, that momentary lapse with the Zubrovka, Belinda bounced back. She had enormous resiliency, she was the original survivor (Maude used to say Belinda would have walked home from the
Titanic
sinking), and her injuries quickly mended. Luckily her face had escaped irreparable damage, and between the lot of us we soon had her in good spirits again. Few but the “friends of Bill” knew about her having ingested nearly a bottle of Polish vodka (she joked about having a thing for buffalo grass), and the incident resulted in no flare-up of her addiction. She confided to me that she thought that by now she’d completely lost her taste for alcohol and we counted that a blessing.

In the meantime, Faun didn’t show much remorse. She was pure brass, still denying any wrongdoing in the matter. Some people are without shame; she headed the list.

Maude had a long, serious talk with her behind closed doors, though what good such talk did I couldn’t have said. Still, certain changes had come about: Bobby was permanently banished. No music blared, no lights burned late. And now there was no more talk about the “tome,” about pub dates and book-and-author luncheons and best-seller lists, no more
tap tap
of the typewriter, which she put away in her closet. The new broom swept clean, and Faun quickly renovated her whole style; she began wearing clothes more suitable to her age. It was a tonier, more uptown sort of look, lots of status symbols—stack heels, rings on only two fingers, hair held back with barrettes, her good jewelry. There’d even been a speech change, not so slangy, and I’d hear her toss in bits of French or Italian. Now she came around with a whole contingent of Continentals she’d fallen in with at the same club.

Belinda improved daily, and when I was sure she was going to be all right, I temporarily shifted my operations to New York, where I went through the harrowing procedure of seeing my play put on—but not for long; it closed on the third night. Among the first-nighters I stumbled across was my ex-spouse. Jenny was in town visiting friends and had come to lend moral support. We didn’t get to say much more than hello-goodbye, but I took her to Jim McMullen’s for lunch next day and we talked things out. It was funny how, no longer suffering the bonds of matrimony, we could relax with each other and be friends. She was “seeing” someone she’d known since childhood, a middle-aged widower up in the bucks, now looking for a second wife. Jen wanted to sell the Sunset Plaza house, and I agreed that it had served its purpose nobly; I had no wish to return there. Put it on the market and we’d split the profits. She even invited me to the wedding the following June.

When my play had fallen on its ass, I went away to lick my wounds, eventually to sneak back into L.A., tail between my legs. No matter how philosophical you try to act, a flop hurts, and I wasn’t experienced enough to know how to handle it. But Maude was there to tend my wounds. The Cottage was filled with flowers, the windows sparkled, and I gratefully took up my abode again at Sunnyside. Before I knew it I was feeling at home, as if I’d lived there all my life.

Nothing much seemed to have changed around the old place. Maude’s garden was showing the last of its flowers, the chrysanthemums gave the flower borders an autumnal air, and with a nip in the weather the pool heater had been turned up. We resumed our swimming sessions, and as we talked across the water it dawned on me that I’d been living at Sunnyside a whole year. By now Belinda had fully recovered from her accident—the face was fine; looked better than ever—and she’d gone back to her golf and tennis, and Frank drove by often to take her to the Wilshire Club.

And where was Faun? Faun was long gone, which, I decided, was why everyone was so relaxed these days. She’d been gone a month, not a word, nor did we have any idea when she might return—if she returned at all. Yet of course it happened; the bad penny always turns up.

It was a Friday afternoon around four; Angie had driven her station wagon up to take away some furniture Maude was getting rid of; Maude’s lawyer, Felix Pass, and his wife, Mildred, had stopped by to visit, and Frank was due as well. We were all sitting out on the terrace, enjoying the view to the west, those empty hills that run in a ridge from beyond Mulholland Drive out past the Will Rogers Ranch, straight to the junction of Malibu and Santa Monica, out past Topanga Canyon. Then we looked suddenly to the doorway, where a group of unexpected guests appeared behind Ling.

“Hi, everybody!”

A figure darted forward and it took me a second to recognize who it was. Her hair was blonder and cut short like a boy’s and she’d lost weight. Like some fairy sprite she skipped across the brickwork, arms open in greeting, and leaned down to kiss Maude. “Hi, Nana! What a perfectly gorgeous color!” she exclaimed over Maude’s dress, then whirled away to kiss Belinda, all the time acting as if her sudden appearance were the most natural thing in the world.

“Oh, Mummy, isn’t it unbelievable? Here I am, home again,” she cried gaily. “You’ll never guess the incredible things I’ve been doing. The fabulous places I’ve seen! And Mummy”—she waved to her companions, who approached diffidently—“Mummy—everybody, these are my friends. Asho, darling, come here.” She imperiously directed one of the young men, who came to her side, a dark, slender youth of medium height and impeccable manners. “Ashoka, come kiss Mummy,” she instructed him, and he did so, taking Belinda’s hand and touching his lips to it as he bent. He was all European luxe, gloss and gold jewelry, looking (Angie later said) like one of those broomstick-shaped pseudo-counts in skinny blazers with crests on the pockets who only half-wait on you at Gucci’s. This royal young gentleman—no mere count, he—was introduced as “Prince,” His Highness Prince Ashoka Jasamin Ashokar, hereditary heir to some Moslem principality whose name still escapes me.

“Asho was named for a horse—an Arabian stallion,” Faun explained as her young friend flashed both teeth and eyes and made his way around the guests, bending over the other ladies’ hands.

“Jasamin by name,” Angie muttered in my ear, “and Jasamin by nature, I should think.” The prince, more weeping willow than good Arabian horseflesh, exchanged nods with me as he jerked a neat bow, and it occurred to me he might have a key in his back.

“And this,” proceeded Faun, leading forward a doll-like figure of a girl who locomoted herself toward us with tiny gliding steps, showing us gigantic eyes all scribbled around with pencils of many colors and a beauty mark just
there
—“this” was the prince’s “sister,” whom Faun called Vashti like Jane Withers in
Giant
, and when Vashti articulated some words in our direction she spoke with a British accent, having been taught by the onetime governess of Grace Kelly’s children. In her nose she wore a notable diamond and from her ears hung diamond pendants.

With these impressive personages were three or four others of commoner clay, names supplied by Faun that I failed to catch, though it seemed safe to assume they were subjects of H.R.H. There was much getting up and sitting down and the exchange of hollow pleasantries, and presently this party sprang up and trooped off behind Faun to take a gander at the tennis courts, the fountains, and the pools, while the rest of us fastened our seatbelts, for, to coin a phrase, it was going to be a bumpy night.

No; I was wrong. Other nights were to prove bumpy, but not this one, for having showed off the ancestral manse to her satisfaction, having got the princeling and princessling (well accustomed to palaces, our royals) to ooh and ah a bit, she had them all troop past us again and then they were gone. Kiss-kiss, bye-bye; the toy princess waved her bedizened fingers and rolled her kohled eyes, the prince bent over all the ladies’ hands again, murmuring little Continental
tendresses
, “so happy, so much, thank you,
au ’voir
,
arrivederci
,” favored me with what must have been his most sincere handshake, and then he, too, was gone.

Luckily (as we considered matters) Faun had not come home to roost (well, she had, but we didn’t know it then), only to show off her grandmother to the prince, the prince to Nana, but, of course, she couldn’t stay. Friend Ashoka had engaged a large suite at the Beverly Wilshire, the very quarters occupied at times by Babs Hutton and Warren Beatty (not simultaneously). Hotelward proceeded this coterie of glittering nomads; the prince apparently lived in an unending succession of hotel suites, but was here to look at houses, having decided to take up his abode somewhere in the Hollywoods.