Death Was in the Picture (24 page)

“Well, he was. Baron was going to play the aging inventor.”

“Well
that’s
a step up,” I said. “An odd one in a way. I mean, you’d think they’d have other up and coming stars on contract.”

“Oh sure,” Rosalyn said. “Sure they do. But I heard Baron has it in
his
contract that if anything happened to Laird, he’d get the starring male lead role.”

“But they’re both contract players, right? Don’t they just go where they’re told?”

“Sure,” Rosalyn said. “That’s right. But they still sometimes have billing clauses in their contracts. Like, it wouldn’t have just been for this one film. But for the duration.”

“For the balance of their contracts, Baron walks into the place where Laird was supposed to stand?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “It’s just what I heard.”

“Isn’t that unusual? It sounds hinky to me.”

“I guess it’s unusual. But it seems like it was a safe bet for production, right? I mean, what was going to happen to Laird?”

It was a good point. Young, strong and in his prime, it would have been pretty good odds that nothing would happen to the main star; meanwhile it secured a seasoned professional for important but less visible roles. Not the starring, romantic role.

So that was something like a motive. But was it enough to kill for? I didn’t think so. I looked over toward the place where Baron sat in a director’s chair with his name painted on the back. Two makeup girls hovered around him trying as much as they could to repair the damage time had done. The director was chatting with him earnestly, even anxiously; in fact the whole set seemed focused on Baron’s happiness and his presence. He was once again a star.

“So who did they get to take Baron’s original role?” I asked.

Rosalyn pointed to an old man, erect but definitely grizzled; handsome but decidedly gray. I looked back to the place where Baron sat enfolded in the palm of stardom. In comparison he was the very picture of a man in his prime.

Was it enough to kill for? Not for everyone, certainly. Not
for me. Perhaps not for you. But maybe—just maybe—for someone who had once held it all, had seen time wash it away rather than reward the effort of a lifetime, maybe for someone like that, it would be enough.

THE SCENE BARON shot with us was a quick one, mercifully. And he didn’t even come close to recognizing me. The director had him run up a ramp between us as we undulated here and there. Then he ran in a different direction while we looked after him adoringly, waving him away. Honestly? What we were doing—
everything
we were doing—felt ridiculous to me. Quite beyond the suspension of anyone’s belief. But I’d read enough movie magazines to understand there were several layers of magic between what was happening there on that soundstage and what an audience would eventually see in a theater. Still. It felt just plain goofy and if I hadn’t been so miserable and uncomfortable it would occasionally have been difficult not to laugh.

Once Baron was gone—presumably back to some bungalow with a star on the door—the director put us through some more handmaidenish paces. I gathered from the type of things we were being made to do that these scenes wouldn’t appear in the movie back to back, but rather would seem to be happening over the course of years. The film’s story “had a huge canvas.” It was a phrase I overheard a couple of times that day and I understood it to mean the director was building what he hoped was a Cecil B. DeMille-style epic, though it seemed to me he was certainly no Cecil B. DeMille.

When the director was finally done with us, he said he was settling for a few second-rate scenes, but made it clear he’d already spent too much time on the footage he’d shot with us in it. This imperfection was the fault of his forty incompetent handmaidens. By then, all of us handmaidens were well past
caring. We just wanted the lead dresses off, off, off so our bodies could begin to recall what normalcy felt like. A funny little bus came and took us back to wardrobe in shifts and we climbed aboard one at a time dispiritedly. Oh, it really had been a long day.

Rosalyn and I stuck together through all of the shooting, and we stayed together after we were through. “Now I know what it must feel like when someone loses a lot of weight,” she said, executing a neat little pirouette on the street between sound-stages. We both looked smaller and felt lighter, but the exotic makeup remained, for the moment. That would take special care at home.

“I know what you mean,” I said, enjoying the light feeling of just walking around without struggle. I’d never appreciated the plain dress and light coat I’d chosen that morning more.

“You wanna go to the commissary? Get a bite?” Rosalyn asked as we walked toward the Washington Boulevard entrance to the studio. I was tired and had only been thinking of beginning the progression of streetcars that would be required to get me home, but her question got my tummy rumbling.

I looked at her, wide-eyed. “I don’t think it’s for extras.” I didn’t know much, but I knew that. The sheer number of extras around would have made it impossible to feed all of them.

“I’m no extra,” she said defensively.

“You were today,” I pointed out.

“True. But most of the time, I’m not. And, anyway, I know a guy …”

“Yeah well, sure,” I said. “If you can get us in, I’m game.” I was enjoying Rosalyn’s company. Anyway, I wasn’t about to turn down either free or reasonable food.

I followed her through the studio streets. To me it all seemed nonsensical and labyrinthine, but she seemed to know where she was going. One building out of many appeared normal in that it had windows and doors that could not be driven through.
I could tell it was an office, because you could see people through the windows working at desks.

As we passed one office, I was surprised to see Dex, reclining on a comfy looking leather sofa, a long and elegant stogie in his hand. He was pontificating about something or other—I could see his lips move. As he spoke, he gesticulated with a low-ball glass in the other hand. I was close enough to see a generous portion of amber liquid sloshing around over a couple of rocks and a couple of other men seated with him in the room—Mustard not among them—with expressions of frozen good humor on their faces. They must have pretended that Dex was really wealthy in order for studio bosses to be putting up with as much as the faces of these men told me they were. I stopped myself from groaning. Depending on when
this
had started, things might not be going well.

Rosalyn followed my glance. “Hey,” she said, “that’s the swell we saw when we were on-set this afternoon. Wonder what he’s doing here?”

I didn’t look and I didn’t answer and I just kept moving her along.

A long low car was parked behind the building, and I recognized Mustard in the driver’s seat, his nose buried in what might have been a racing form. This didn’t bode well either. Mustard wouldn’t have liked being relegated to the role of manservant or chauffeur.

The commissary was bigger than I’d expected, taking up what looked like the entire lower portion of still another building. For some reason, I’d also expected it would be cafeteria style. Maybe just the word—commissary—put me in mind of it. But it was not. Waitresses in carefully starched pale uniforms and tidy matching hats gave the room an almost military presence.

“It has to be a bit like the army,” Rosalyn said when I mentioned this to her. “I’ve heard they serve close to three thousand lunches here every single day.”

We took an open table at the center of the room and I tried to keep my eyes from darting around to see who was there. For the most part, though, the people I
thought
I was recognizing I wasn’t sure about. For instance, I thought I saw Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford sharing a pot of tea at a corner table, but admonished myself for the thought. The two women were known to be jealous of each other, I’d read all about it in movie magazines. Tea and biscuits between them seemed unlikely.

“Oh you’re close, though,” Rosalyn said. “Half right. The one on the left
is
Miss Shearer. But the other woman isn’t Miss Crawford: it’s Florence Eldridge.”

“It is? She looks different in person.”

“They all do, don’t you think? But yes: it’s definitely Miss Eldridge. The two of them got chummy when they were making
The Divorcee
here last year.”

A waitress arrived at our table, diverting my attention from the two stars at their tea party. “You ladies eating or yakking?” she asked pertly.

“Eating, I think,” Rosalyn said. “We’ve been encased in lead all day.”

The waitress looked at us like this was the most natural thing in the world. I suppose, to her, it probably was, in this place where space creatures, cowboys and circus performers might sometimes lunch together. We took the menus she offered and she moved off on her round of the dining room.

Sitting there, finally, with the weight off our bodies and being bossed around off our minds, I discovered I was famished. At least, I was as soon as my hand touched the menu’s plasticized page. I was so hungry that everything looked lovely, too, but I settled on an egg salad sandwich; Rosalyn opted for grilled cheese and we decided to make like the big stars in the room and split a pot of tea between us.

It was close to five o’clock and the commissary would be
closing soon, but that just seemed to make this visit all the more memorable. I was here, late lunching in a room I’d only ever heard about, with stars of the silver screen all around me. I wasn’t sure the sandwich would be delicious, but the feeling certainly was. For a moment, I felt like a star.

The smell was like a dash of cold water on my feeling of hungry tired contentment. The smell alerted me as much as his voice or the sight of him ever could have.

Rosalyn was in mid-sentence—though what she was saying has now fled from my mind. The scent of him washed it right away. I looked up—Rosalyn suddenly forgotten—in time to see him lumbering past our table. And he wasn’t alone. Xander Dean was being led across the commissary by none other than Joe, the man on the oxblood sofa at the Masquers’ Ball. I tried to have that information make sense to me—that the two of them not only knew each other, but would choose to meet here of all places—but I could not.

“What?” Rosalyn said when she noticed my face. “What is it?” She indicated Dean and the other man, now taking a seat on the other side of the commissary. I looked at them carefully, but neither seemed to have noticed me. For Dean I would be totally out of context, and the only time Joe had seen me, I’d been wearing a mask. Now there was that space makeup, or what the day had left of it, possibly obscuring my identity. Rosalyn was still speaking. I pulled myself back to hear what she said. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost. Do you know those men?”

“I…” I had no idea where to begin. “I can’t explain right now. I’m sorry. You don’t know who they are, do you?”

Rosalyn took a pair of eyeglasses from her handbag. Before she put them on, she looked around carefully to see if anyone was watching.

“No,” she said when she’d looked at them both as closely as she dared. “I don’t know either of them. Sorry. What is it, Kitty?” she said again.

“I’ll tell you sometime. Right now, though, I really … I really need to hear what they’re saying.” I looked at her fully to see if she thought this a horrible thing. Invasive. Or just mad. But her face held no such judgment. Little Rosie Stein had chosen to be an actress, after all. She’d been waiting for the excitement in her life to begin. I could see that excitement reflected now in her eyes.

“Well,” she said helpfully, “our sandwiches haven’t arrived yet. Couldn’t we just, you know, move over there? Sit near them?”

This close to quitting time the commissary was almost empty. We had our choice of tables. Would either man recognize me? It was possible, though I doubted it. In any event, each looked focused on what the other was saying. I decided it was a chance I was willing to take. After all, I told myself when I might have quailed: wasn’t this exactly why Dex and I had finagled this opportunity? We’d been looking for something, even if we hadn’t known exactly what. I thought of Dex back in that office, sloshing his drink and telling his tales. If anyone was going to discover anything today, it was going to have to be me.

“That’s a good idea,” I said to her.

“And you’ll explain it all to me later?”

“Maybe not later,” I promised. “But sometime.”

When we changed tables, I was careful to keep my face away from the two men. I took the seat closest to their table, with my back to them.

As soon as I was seated, I discovered that even if I strained all my attention to their conversation, they were speaking so quietly that I could only make out the occasional word.

“You can’t hear it either, huh?” Rosalyn said, looking disappointed, fully in the spirit of the thing now.

“Ah well,” I said. “We’ll just eat our sandwiches and see where it all leads.”

“Sounds good,” she said, just as the slightly disoriented waitress arrived with our lunch.

Rosalyn and I chatted, though I was careful to speak quietly, fearful that one of the men at the next table would hear my voice and recognize it. That seemed unlikely as both of them were intent on their own conversation. I could determine that Joe was in charge. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to say he had power over Dean but, at a certain level, that was very much what it sounded like.

I heard the word “Chicago” a couple of times, though I couldn’t tell which of them said it. I thought I heard “Laird Wyndham” and I thought I heard “the league” but I might have been mistaken. Such was the way the sound was carrying. When I peeked round at them, though, I thought both men looked uncomfortable, as though they’d rather be anyplace else.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Rosalyn at one point, “I’m ruining our lunch.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say ruining,” she assured me. “But we sure were having a better time before those two showed up.”

“I need to find out what they’re doing here,” I said. “Any ideas?”