All That Glitters (59 page)

I knew that Frank hadn’t wanted any special notice taken of the fact that this was to be his and Belinda’s formal engagement, no speeches or cameras, and he wasn’t going to make a thing out of giving her the ring. He simply waited until no one was looking and whisked her out through the back of the tent into the garden, then took her along the pool to the pavilion at the end, where, alone with her, he put the ring on her finger.

The ring was no surprise, since she knew all about it, but when she came back in, displaying it, you could tell she was as thrilled as if she’d been twenty and Frank her first fiancé. We were all seated around our table and Belinda was going from person to person showing off the ring, and as I glanced up, I saw Faun standing alone; she couldn’t have been aware that anyone was looking at her or she would never have worn so naked a look on her face. I felt a chill, it was so filled with malevolence. She went on staring until I walked over and touched her; then she started as though I’d given her an electric shock and her hand covered the spot on her arm where my fingers had rested, as if she were covering a painful burn.

“Go tell your mother you’re pleased,” I urged, “and Frank. It would mean so much to them.”

When she turned her eyes on me, I saw that the green-eyed monster was still lurking; she couldn’t rid herself of it. Just then Angie joined us. “Yes, do it!” she exclaimed, slipping a friendly arm around Faun’s waist and giving her a kiss. “It
would
make them happy—”

“Why should I?” Faun snapped. “What do I care if they’re happy?”

She ground out the words, bitter as could be. I was about to ask her to dance again when she whirled suddenly, then started rapidly for the entrance.

“Where are you going?” Angie called.

When Faun made no reply I hurried after her. “Faun, don’t leave now, don’t spoil things for your mother.”

“She’s spoiled things for me, I guess I can do the same for her. But this time I’m going to spoil them for good.”

She spoke quietly, almost in a whisper, then walked quickly away. I glanced around for Angie, who’d gone to have a word with Felix and Millie. I wandered out onto the lawn, where the air was still warm from the day’s heat. As I looked out beyond the wall I saw a car come speeding out of the parking area, lights off, and as it skewed on the gravel I heard the motor with that ticking sound: there went Faun, her scarf flying out the window behind her.

“Look,” Angie said, coming up beside me and pointing at the two figures silhouetted against the section of wall directly opposite us. It was the lovers, their figures made one, washed with the turquoise light from the pool. “Oh Chazz,” she said, “it really
is
never too late, is it?”

She slipped an arm around my shoulder and bussed my cheek; we were happy for them, happy for everything that had brought them together, just happy.

They looked over and waved us on; we came around the pool and joined them. When Belinda asked if we’d seen Faun, I lied outright, saying I’d just danced with her and she’d gone to the ladies’ room. Angie seconded the falsehood. When Belinda suggested that she go look for her, I said let’s dance instead. Frank took Angie, I Belinda, and we went back inside.

But as we danced, she began speculating about Faun again, and I made up a story about not having wanted to tell her but Faun hadn’t been feeling well and had gone home. I could see Belinda’s immediate concern; she said she’d wait ten minutes, then call Angie’s house to check on her. No, let me do it, I said; then the orchestra broke and I led Belinda back to Maude’s table.

When I called Angie’s house I got no answer, but I remembered Faun’s having mentioned something about another party. A moment later, Maude came up, saying she was tired and was going to slip off to bed. Then everyone was saying good night. Belinda and Angie got their bags and wraps and were ready to leave with Frank, who would drive them back to Cat Wells, while Ling was hovering in the background, waiting to take me to Frank’s.

I was yawning grossly when I left the party and walked out to the waiting car. Ling left me off in Frank’s driveway, and after we’d planned our time of departure in the morning, he drove away. I let myself in the side door, took a soft drink from the fridge and went back to my room, undressed, had a quick shower, put on my sleeping shirt, turned on the TV, and fell into bed. I watched the end of an old clinker—so help me,
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
—and it wasn’t long before I was overcome with sleepiness. I doused the set, the reading light as well, and drifted off without the least trouble.

I should have slept straight through until daylight, but I didn’t. Something woke me. It was shortly after two—I know because I looked at the digital clock on top of the television set. I was sure Frank must have come in, because I’d heard a car, then the sound of the automatic door rolling up—and it seemed there was another car, though, funnily enough, I thought that the other one had driven off; I vaguely recalled the sound of the motor as it went.

As I got up to go to the bathroom, my elbow accidentally hit my drink and knocked it on the rug. I got a towel and mopped up the wet, then opened my door and went along the passage to the kitchen to get a fresh drink.

The kitchen lights were still on. I was in error, then: Frank hadn’t come home at all. He must still be over at Angie’s. This struck me as a little strange, because he, too, was leaving for L.A. at cockcrow.

I got my drink from the refrigerator shelf, and as I shut the door I became aware of the sound of a running motor. I peered out the window above the sink, but the driveway was empty. The noise persisted, however. I set my drink down and stepped to the connecting door to the garage. When I opened it, a burst of smoke and poisonous fumes struck me in the face. The whole garage was filled with a deathly pall of smoke. I jumped back, slapped a wet dishtowel to my face, then reached around the doorjamb and touched the electric button to raise the garage door. As the fumes gradually began to clear, I tried to see through the haze to Frank’s car, which I now could make out in its usual place, with the motor steadily operating. When the smoke cleared further, I began to make out a figure hunched over the steering wheel.

My shout was involuntary. I clapped the rag over my nose again and dashed around the rear of the car to the driver’s side, where I yanked open the door and pulled Frank out. I dragged him across the concrete, out to the lawn and fresh air. Not only was he out cold, but there was a lot of blood. It was then I saw the hole in his forehead, the blood still leaking out. Dead, he was stone dead.

I ran inside and called the police, woke Lina, then telephoned to Angie to come at once. “See if you can make it here alone,” I suggested, but it was no use. When she rolled in, Belinda was right beside her. I told her what had happened—there wasn’t any keeping it from her. She wanted to see him, but I talked her out of that idea. I don’t think she ever saw him again until we went to the funeral parlor. He wasn’t a pretty sight, even with the wax plugging the bullet hole.

Needless to say, nobody went home in the morning.

Frank dead. Like everybody else, I heard the words and on hearing them told myself it wasn’t true. Frank dead? Frank Adonis, shot through the head? The words were stunning, and the deep welling inside left me feeling bludgeoned. They let me look at the body “for purposes of identification,” and I confess, it was the deadest looking body to be seen. I left the morgue and drove straight to the Passes’ house and told Felix; together he and I told Maude. Though she took the news calmly, I could see how it jolted her. She had been enormously fond of Frank; theirs was an old and special relationship, and it was a bitter blow. Crispin, Perry, and now Frank.

But it was of Belinda we all thought; Belinda, to whom the tragedy meant more than the rest of us. Much as he meant to all of us, those who knew him best, much as we loved and admired him and would miss him, it was Belinda who suffered the worst shock, the strongest blow. Belinda, whose very life hinged on him. Belinda, whose long, crooked path of life had somehow straightened itself out because of Frank. It was wicked; it was sinful; it wasn’t to be borne. But she bore, we all bore, because in these times, what else is there to do?

Frank dead.

There were questions, many questions to be asked. Since the shooting had taken place in Riverside County, the whole matter was dumped into the hands of the county seat in Riverside, twenty miles away. For four days the headlines blazed reports, rumors, and hearsay. Everybody who’d been at the Pass party was questioned by the proper authorities, with special emphasis on those who’d last seen Frank alive, Angie, Belinda, myself.

Whoever had killed Frank had either lain in wait to ambush him at his house or had followed his car from Angle’s house in Cathedral Wells. Frank had driven the car into his drive, used the automatic button to open his garage door, driven in, and before he could even shut off his motor he’d been shot at close range. Executed, the papers said, for it was found to be a typical gangland slaying, and it produced another addition to the list of unsolved Hollywood Who Killed Cock Robin Murders. Who killed William Desmond Taylor? Who killed Thelma Todd? Who killed Frank Adonis?

It was tabloids and Late Editions and TV time. Somebody had iced Frank Adonis and the cops were going crazy looking for a suspect. The weird thing was, there weren’t any. In that silent night of Christmas week down in the desert, Frank had been shot through the head with a Saturday-night special and the only witnesses to the dirty deed were the heavenly stars that had looked down for thousands of years, and the stars weren’t talking.

Who had been the last to see Frank alive? Angie and Belinda were two, a service station attendant where he stopped for gas made three—who else? Had he gone straight home or had he stopped elsewhere along the way? He’d used his car telephone, but there was no record of the calls made. A witness claimed to have seen Frank’s car tooling along Palm Canyon Drive around two. If so, where was he going, or where had he been?

What fingers there were pointed merely at “person or persons unknown,” faceless phantoms in the Vegas crowd, some of whom were known to have had sundry dealings with Frank.

At the trial much testimony was offered by a variety of people, by the servants, by those who had last seen him alive, including Angelina Brown, the newly affianced Belinda Carroll, myself, even Maude Antrim. None of it proved in any way helpful. As for Maude, the press had a field day with her, since she hadn’t made a public appearance in over twenty years. There she was, nicely dressed, quietly answering “to the best of my ability” each of the questions put to her, but you could see she wasn’t up to it.

A hundred Maude Antrims wouldn’t have made much difference, since nobody knew or had anything relevant to relate. It was a homicide, all right, but not the kind the cops like. Detectives are hired by the police department to dig up clues, find suspects, take down fingerprints, deduce things, bring in culprits, only in this case there were no culprits.

There
was
the matter of the
car
, however. Lina, the Mexican servant at Frank’s house, stated that at approximately one-thirty in the morning she heard what she believed to have been a backfire in the driveway, and when she roused herself further she thought she heard a car driving away. But it was dark and she couldn’t see.

Miss Carroll’s testimony had been taken in the form of a legal deposition; she wasn’t in any shape to take the stand in Riverside County Courthouse, but lay in a private room in a Palm Springs hospital under the care of a team of doctors who kept both press and police at bay. Only the county coroner and a court clerk were present when Miss Carroll had her say. It wasn’t much. They’d become engaged that night, he’d given her a diamond ring, they’d planned to be married in February, the victim was planning to retire soon from his business practice as a well-known Hollywood talent agent and producer, that was about it.

It wasn’t, of course; there was plenty of other comment, most of it garbage. The news file on Frank was dragged out; that file was then tied onto Belinda’s file, as well as those covering Babe Austrian and a host of other famous women, including Claire Regrett. The morgues of the
Los Angeles Times
were ransacked for the juiciest, most lurid stories with which to attract their readership. But as for “person or persons unknown,” they still roamed at liberty, whoever they were, free to go about their daily tasks, free, if so moved, to murder other innocent people.

Frank Adonis murdered? The guy everybody loved? It didn’t make much sense, certainly not to the police, or to the newspapers, who, though they had a fair load of tripe to sell, had little more than tripe—and knew it. Those who knew more—and there were a few of those—kept their traps shut. The identity of the murderer, along with the identity of the owner of the car that left the house on Mondrian Drive late that night, remained a family secret, one more skeleton rattling around among several other family skeletons in the oversized Antrim closet.

Nor did the fact hurt that a close friend of the deceased was at one and the same time the chief magistrate of Cathedral Wells; having over the years garnered the friendship and admiration of many influential and important men in the area, the magistrate was quick to utilize her influence. The case was dropped, not with a thud, but quietly. And if in Vegas there were those who claimed that some hit-man in the employ of old Ears Satriano had waggled the finger, they, like us, knew there was but little truth in that theory.

Since I, too, had been present during the events leading up to Frank’s death, I came in for my own share of questioning, but I had little to offer in the way of a solution. I was all three monkeys—I had heard no evil and seen no evil, and I certainly told no evil. What I
thought
I knew was something else, but nobody asked me for my suspicions in the matter. And while it was hoped by the police that one or more of us, his close friends, would be able to shed some light on the killing, they were flogging a dead horse while up a blind alley. Since I was such a dull witness, I was ordered to step down, after which I was free to come and go as I wished.