An Inconvenient Woman (62 page)

“Then be indelicate. I’m sure it will not be your first indelicacy.”

“You see, I have the forty hours of microcassettes. Actually, I mean that I have thirty-nine of the forty hours. There was one cassette left in my tape recorder which is still in Miss March’s house. She seemed very private about it. Something about our mutual friend Hector’s death. Even to me, she would not reveal the entire contents.”

Beneath the wide brim of her straw hat, Pauline closed her eyes. She was determined not to allow Cyril Rathbone to witness a tear escaping.

“For a price, I would be able to turn everything over to you,” he said.

“So that’s what this matter of urgency is about,” she said. “I should have known. Blackmail.”

“Your son, your bad-boy son, Kippie, isn’t that his name? It has something to do with your son,” said Cyril.

Pauline raised her eyebrows in an arch of displeasure
meant to disguise the fear that she felt, but she did not trust herself to speak, as that fear might have become apparent. Another wasp buzzed near her. She looked down at her shoulder and, with her gloved hand, flicked it off her in a nervous fashion that had nothing to do with the wasp but everything to do with the words that were coming out of the mouth of Cyril Rathbone.

He leaned forward toward her again, aware that finally he had succeeded in reaching her vulnerable point. A smile twisted his lips as he continued elaborating on the details. “Apparently—this is all according to Flo March, of course—your son, while on temporary leave from his drug rehabilitation center in France, was arrested in the Los Angeles airport for carrying drugs. He needed ten thousand dollars immediately. You refused him, apparently. As did the gangster Arnie Zwillman, with whom your son enjoys a peculiar sort of friendship. And so he went late that night to visit your best friend, Hector, catching poor Hector, apparently, in the middle of a sexual act of a deviant nature with a well-known video star of the pornographic variety named Lonny Edge, whom Hector picked up in a gay bar in West Hollywood called Miss Garbo’s on the way home from a very swanky party in your house that you declined to let me cover for my column. Incidentally, of no moment here, Mr. Lonny Edge has subsequently become the housemate of Flo March, to help cover the destitute woman’s living expenses, since you saw fit to cancel the bequests made to her by your husband. At any rate, your son, Kippie, was so hard-pressed for the ten thousand dollars that you would not give him that he offered himself sexually to your friend, Hector, although that sort of thing was not remotely his inclination. When Hector refused, there was a bit of a scuffle, apparently, and Hector produced a gun, and—”

The wasp that Pauline had flicked off her shoulder flew into Cyril Rathbone’s mouth and stung his tongue. In an agony of pain, he could not even scream as his tongue swelled with the poison of the sting. His eyes rolled in his head, imploring Pauline for help.

Pauline stared at the spectacle of the writhing man in front of her. Sweat broke out on his face and body. His shirt became soaked, and the sweat seeped through to his seersucker suit. He tried to stand and then fell to his knees in front
of her. She picked up the basket that held the roses she had been cutting.

Pauline drew out her clippers and started to work on her roses. “You must always clear away any foliage that will be beneath the water level in the vase,” she said, bringing her gloved hand down the stem and pulling off the leaves. “And then, when you cut off the bottom of the stem, make sure always that you do it at an angle, like this, do you see? Now, these roses from my garden have particularly thick stems, which makes it difficult for the water to penetrate, so I always suggest, when I talk to the newcomers at the garden club, to peel away half the stem, like this.”

Cyril Rathbone twisted and turned. With his mouth wide open, she saw that his tongue was hugely inflated and vividly red. Saliva dripped out of his mouth and rolled down his chin. He began to choke, holding his hands to his throat, and terrible noises emanated from his mouth.

“I hope it hurts terribly, Cyril,” she said calmly.

Finally, she had called him by his first name, but he was by then beyond caring. Cyril Rathbone fell over, dead.

Pauline walked across the lawn and into the house through the French doors in the library, carrying her basket of roses. As she did so, Dudley passed in the hallway beyond.

“Dudley,” called out Pauline.

“Yes, Mrs. Mendelson?” he said, entering the room.

“That man from
Mulholland
magazine?”

“Mr. Rathbone?” he replied.

“He seemed to be in some sort of distress. A coughing fit, choking or something. Perhaps Smitty or Jim should go down and check on him.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mendelson. I’ll buzz Smitty in the kennels.”

Pauline deposited her roses on the table and continued on to the hallway and up the stairs. Midway up, she turned. “And, Dudley,” she called.

“Yes, Mrs. Mendelson.”

“I think you should call an ambulance.” She continued up the stairs. “And the police.”

Flo’s Tape #26

“It often surprised me that Jules didn’t have a bodyguard, or bodyguards. So many of the film stars went around surrounded by them, as did many of the millionaires in the city who were nowhere near as rich as Jules. Of course, there were guards at Clouds and attack dogs, and they kept a fake police car in the driveway to scare off the curious, but he never went out in public with guards. He thought they attracted too much attention. And he said if anybody was going to get him, they’d get him anyway. He didn’t think it looked right for a presidential designate, which he was, to go around with guards just because he was rich.

“One time when I was in the Bentley with him, driving back to my old neighborhood in Silverlake to pick up some mail, he opened the glove compartment and took out a gun that he held in his lap while we drove. I hated that. But he said there were people out there, mad people, who were out to get people like him.”

B
y the time Pauline had bathed and changed, both the ambulance and the police had arrived and parked their vehicles in the courtyard. She sent word down to Dudley by Blondell not to allow the attendants to carry Cyril Rathbone’s body through her house to get to the ambulance, but to carry it around by the side of the house behind the kennels. From her bedroom, where the windows were open, she could hear one of the attendants say, in a Hispanic accent, as he was lifting the remains of Cyril Rathbone into the ambulance, “They’re dropping like flies in this house. This is my second time here. Last time I accidentally hit the picture on the stairs, and you should have heard the lady squawk.”

Pauline waited until the ambulance had departed before she came downstairs to meet with Captain Nelson and Officer Whitbeck of the Beverly Hills Police Department.

In the library where they were waiting, the two policemen wandered around the magnificent room, silently looking at objects on tables and the pictures on the walls. Officer Whitbeck occasionally cleared his throat to get the attention of Captain Nelson, and then pointed to a treasure he thought the captain might have missed in his perusal of the room.

“Do you think it’s okay to sit?” asked Officer Whitbeck, eyeing the green leather English chair that had been Jules Mendelson’s favorite, wanting to lounge in it.

Captain Nelson shook his head. “We better stand,” he said.

The library door opened and Pauline entered the room. Wafts of expensive perfume preceded and trailed her. “I hope you’ve been offered a drink, or something, Captain,” she said, going toward him and shaking his hand. “I’m Pauline Mendelson.”

They had heard and read about the beautiful and very rich widow.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Mendelson,” said Captain Nelson. “This is Officer Whitbeck.”

Pauline smiled at Officer Whitbeck. “Please, for heaven’s sake. Don’t stand. Take a seat. Sit there, Officer Whitbeck. That was my husband’s favorite chair. You must forgive me for keeping you waiting. I stayed upstairs until the ambulance attendants had removed Mr. Rathbone’s body. It brought back such sad memories. My husband recently died.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Captain Nelson, unable to take his eyes off her.

The sheer social power of her overwhelmed the room. Although neither policeman knew anything about fashion or style, each was aware that Pauline Mendelson was wonderfully dressed, in printed silk and quiet gold jewelry, as if she were on her way to a tea. She sat perfectly and with a gesture turned the meeting over to them, as if she were in their power; but they knew, as she did, that they were in hers.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” said Officer Whitbeck. “But we have to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course,” she said.

“About your guest, Mr. Rathbone,” continued Officer Whitbeck.

“But I barely knew Mr. Rathbone, Officer Whitbeck. He wasn’t a guest, in the sense that he had been invited here by me. It was such a strange thing. He is a writer of some sort for
Mulholland
magazine. He had taken a great interest in a yellow phalaenopsis that my head gardener and I have developed, and asked that he be allowed to visit my greenhouse.”

“A yellow what?” asked Officer Whitbeck, who was taking notes. “Can you spell that?”

“It’s a breed of orchid,” said Pauline. “Usually white, but Jarvis, my gardener, and I were able to develop a yellow variety, which I’m proud to say has caused quite a stir in horticultural circles. My garden is my passion. The Los Angeles Garden Club has been here to see it, and it’s been photographed for several of the gardening magazines. Mr. Rathbone wanted to see my phalaenopsis, for something he was writing, I suppose. I was cutting roses in my garden when he arrived. There they are there.” She pointed to the basket of red and pink roses that she had left on the library table. “I must put them in water before they die. Do you mind? It’s
terrible for them to just lie there in this heat. We can talk at the same time.”

“No, no. Go right ahead, Mrs. Mendelson,” said Captain Nelson.

“The next thing I knew he had started to cough and choke, and I asked Dudley, my butler, to send the men down to see if he was all right,” called out Pauline from the lavatory, as she ran water for the flowers.

“Do you know his age, Mrs. Mendelson?”

“You’ll have to call his magazine. I really didn’t know him. Was it a heart attack?” she asked, as she came back into the room with the roses in a vase. “I’ll arrange these later.”

“He was stung in his mouth by a wasp,” said Captain Nelson.

“Good heavens,” she said.

When they were gone, she picked up the telephone and dialed. “This is Mrs. Jules Mendelson. I would like to speak to Mr. Pond.… I see.… Well, ask him anyway. I’m sure if you buzz in, he’ll take my call.… Sandy, darling, it’s Pauline,” she said when the publisher came on the telephone. “Such a strange thing has happened. I need your help. This awful man who keeps writing these terrible things about Jules and that woman. What?… Yes, yes. That’s his name.… Rathbone … I’ll tell you what-about-him. He just died in my house.”

Much was made in the press of the bizarre death of Cyril Rathbone, the controversial columnist for
Mulholland
magazine, who had “choked to death after having been stung on the tongue by a wasp in the sculpture garden of the mountain-top estate of Mrs. Jules Mendelson.” The only other mention of Pauline Mendelson’s name in the account in the
Los Angeles Tribunal
, however, was to say that she had not been home at the time. Exactly what Cyril Rathbone was doing sitting alone in Pauline Mendelson’s sculpture garden, where his body was discovered by the butler, was a mystery that caused much speculation, as it was a known fact in social circles that the lady of the house despised him and had never invited him to her home.

No one contributed more to the speculation than Hortense Madden, the literary critic of
Mulholland
, who had also, for quite different reasons, despised Cyril. She reveled in each
grotesque detail of his demise, as reported to her by the ambulance attendant, Faustino, whom she managed to track down, as well as by the undertaker, who had both embalmed Cyril and laid him out in the closed coffin. Their descriptions of the size and the color of Cyril’s tongue fascinated her, and she made them repeat certain particulars, which she wrote in a notebook, like a reporter at the scene of a crime. She even begged to have the coffin opened for a final look at Cyril, but the undertaker refused her request, on professional grounds, as she was not a member of his family.

“My dear, the tongue was swollen to four times its size, ready to burst, apparently. Bright red, turning black,” Hortense breathlessly reported to Lucia Borsodi. “Imagine what he must have been saying to Pauline at the time to have God pick that moment and that manner to take him.”

God was not someone who regularly appeared in Hortense’s conversation or thoughts, and Lucia, for propriety’s sake, drew a halt to the conversation. “But Pauline Mendelson wasn’t even there, Hortense,” she said. “He went there to see her yellow phalaenopsis.”