Gilded Nightmare (7 page)

“The house we lived in belonged to the school, and in the space of a few days we had to move a collection of possessions accumulated over the years. But move to where? It became instantly apparent that my father was to be hounded by Brown; that he could never find himself a job in any school or college, and certainly couldn’t go back to the Church. We had lived all these years on a school teacher’s salary plus the various benefits, like the house, provided by the school. There were now no savings, no house, and no salary of any sort in prospect.

“An old friend of my father’s who believed him offered him a house, rent-free, in California. We disposed of most of our belongings and took the trip west. The house was near Hollywood. I got a job in one of the studios. My mother did baby-sitting and housekeeping chores for one of the lesser film actresses. There was nothing for my father. Somehow the word had followed us to California. He couldn’t even get a job cutting grass. They were afraid he might molest one of their children, for Godsake! Poor, dear man.

“One day I came home from work. On the dining-room table there was a note from my mother, saying she was spending the night with the actress’ children and telling what there was for supper for my father and Jeremiah and me. No one else was at home, it seemed. I went up to my room and found a note propped up on my bureau, written in my father’s strong, distinctive hand. It instructed me not to let my mother go down into the cellar. It said he loved me, and that he was sorry, but there was simply no way out for him.

“I raced down into the cellar and found him hanging by his belt from a furnace pipe. He’d been dead for quite some time.”

Sam looked at us. I think we were all stone statues. He got up and went over to the sideboard to refill his glass. No one spoke. Finally he came back and sat down again.

“This is not the time to discuss the morality of suicide,” he said, “but my father was driven to it by that bitch. But do you know, as time went on, I began to be gnawed by doubts. If he was innocent, why? He had the bulwark of his religion. He had the belief and faith in him of his family. It was a hard time, but where had his courage gone? I knew Charmian. I knew she would do it in Macy’s window to attract attention to herself. I began to wonder if perhaps my father hadn’t made love to her. Oh, she’d have relished it from anyone. Then she’d decided to make her own special, murderous capital out of it. It began to grow more certain in my mind that only a secret guilt could have driven my father to kill himself. He had been a hero figure, a God figure, to me. The doubts about him were like a painful growth in my gut.

“Well, time went on. About four years after my father’s death things had begun to break for me at the studio. I’d got into publicity, and then, when I’d just passed my twenty-first birthday, I sold a story to one of the big independent producers. From then on I was economically secure. I was wined and dined by the Hollywood elite as one of the ‘bright young men.’ It was while I was riding that first crest of success that I read in
Variety
, the show-business bible, that a young actress named Charmian Brown, who’d created a small stir in some off-Broadway production, had been signed to a contract by one of the major studios. She’d always said she’d be the greatest, and evidently she was on her way.”

Sam took time out to make himself his third drink. His eyes were very bright, but the color had completely drained from his face.

“The doubts about my father were suddenly very much alive again, very painful,” Sam said, when he’d resettled in his chair. “I told myself that when Charmian got to Hollywood I’d see her and settle my doubts.

“She was elusive for a while. She’d arrived with considerable fanfare for a nobody, and I heard that she was very rich. Huntingdon Brown had died and left her a very substantial part of his huge fortune. From the very beginning she’s always been able to buy what she wanted, even before Conrad Zetterstrom.” Sam shifted in his chair. “That isn’t quite accurate, because she was never able to buy herself a career as an actress. The trouble was, she just wasn’t very good. But in those first few months that she was in Hollywood that hadn’t yet been revealed. She was beautiful, photogenic, she’d had one set of good notices off-Broadway, and she’d sleep in any bed that might do her career some good.

“When we first met at a party somewhere she brushed me off in a hurry. I was, she figured, a nobody, a kid she’d grown up with. But after a while she got the message somewhere. I was an important young writer.

“She called me on the phone one day, and invited me to her apartment for dinner. God, she was so transparent. She’d learned that I might be some use to her. The dinner was an intimate tête à tête by candlelight. She talked gaily about our childhood, the old days, never once coming anywhere near the basic tragedy that lay between us. I bided my time. I thought I knew what was going to happen, and I thought I knew when the right time would come to ask the question I had to ask.

“A little while after dinner she came directly to the point.

“ ‘I know you’ve always wanted to make love to me, Sam,’ she said. ‘If you’d still like me to, I’d like to—very much.’

“Direct and to the point, our Charmian. We made love. It was a stunning piece of pure sexual techniques.” Sam drew a deep breath. “All the time I was waiting for the time when we’d lie side by side, mutually exhausted. When it came—that relaxed moment—I asked her, enormously casual.

“ ‘Did my father really make a pass at you that night, Charmian?’

“She snuggled close to me. ‘I’m sorry about Uncle Josh, Sam. I never dreamed—’

“ ‘Never dreamed what?’

“ ‘That he’d go to such lengths.’

“ ‘As to kill himself?’

“She nodded.

“ ‘But did he do what you accused him of doing?’

“She laughed. ‘Of course not. I suppose it was naughty of me, Sam, but you know how I am. Anything to be on camera.’ ” Sam’s voice shook. “I—I got up out of that monstrous bed. I remember looking down at her, wondering if I ought to kill her as she lay there, naked, smiling up at me. Then I dressed and ran. I was so close to murder I couldn’t trust myself.”

Sam put down his glass and began to fumble in his pocket for a pipe and pouch.

“I’m not proud of the rest of it,” he said. “You have to understand how much I loved my father to understand the fierce hatred I felt for this gal who’d done him in, made me doubt him.

“I went to work on Charmian. I spread the story here and there, judiciously. Some of the important powerhouses who’d romped around in that mammoth bed were suddenly on the run. She was dangerous. I was responsible for their knowing it. She wasn’t a good actress, so no one was willing to risk giving her a chance just for the kicks involved in knowing her sexually. Charmian Brown’s career died a-borning, and I was responsible. A German director who was doing something in Hollywood decided to run the Charmian risk, but only on his home ground. He signed her for a small part in a movie to be made in Germany. Unless I’m very much mistaken, that film starred Bruno Wald. That may have been when she was first attracted to him.

“I don’t know exactly what happened after that. Either the German director gave her the bounce, or she him. Anyhow, somewhere in that segment of time she met old Conrad Zetterstrom. The next I heard of her was that she’d married the Baron and gone to live on his island. I never saw her again until this afternoon.”

Sam looked up over the flame of the lighter he was holding to his pipe. “That, Pierre, is the story Helwig was referring to. As for its supplying me with a revenge motif—I can only tell you it doesn’t. It’s all past and done with. My father’s image was restored and remains intact in my memory. If I feel anything at all, it’s a small sense of guilt for what I did to her back there in Hollywood. But, by God, she had it coming to her.”

There was a long silence, and then Chambrun asked: “Did she mention it to you today—now—when you went to see her?”

“Oh, she mentioned it,” Sam said. His laugh was short and bitter. “Trust Charmian! But there’s no way to bring my father up out of that cellar.” He shook himself, like a dog coming out of water. “I’m going out for a walk,” he said. “I need to get some fresh air into my lungs.”…

I went looking for Shelda and found a note from her on my desk. It said, in effect, that she’d gotten tired of waiting for me, and if I cared to know what her relationship was, and promised to be, with young Mr. Peter Wynn, I might drop by her place some time. The bitch!

I was just about to lock up my office and head for my apartment to change for the evening when Mr. Amato, the Beaumont’s banquet manager, poked his head in my office door.

“Got a minute, Mr. Haskell?” he asked.

Mr. Amato is a tall, dark, thin man in his early forties. He is a Roman, and he must have been a very beautiful young man with a profile like a god on a coin. There were now little puffs and pouches and lines that suggested dyspepsia and incipient ulcers. I knew that the top of his desk in his own private office was a small apothecary shop, loaded with all kinds of soothing medicines, the kind that coat and the kind that don’t coat, the kind that effervesce and the kind that go down like a milky chalk. I knew that three quarters of his daily intake was medicinal, not caloric.

“I wanted to talk to you for a moment about the Baroness Zetterstrom,” Amato said.

“Who doesn’t?” I said. I was, frankly, up to there with the lady. The two stories we’d heard about her from Sam Culver had left me with a strong feeling of revulsion for Charmian Zetterstrom. Her unnaturally preserved youth added an unhealthy dividend to a potion of sadistic villainy. I had the feeling that to be in her presence was to risk contamination, and I quietly hated myself because of a strong impulse to go to see her again. I would have denied that under oath to Shelda, but there it was. Evil has, unfortunately, a diabolical fascination for most of us that the Ten Commandments lack.

“I want to know what she is like,” Amato said.

“Oh, brother!”

“I mean, does she really know food and wines? Is she a genuine connoisseur, or is she simply a rich show-off?”

“I think she might even be able to tell you whether human flesh tastes better broiled or roasted,” I said.

“My God!” Amato said.

“Seriously, I suspect you can’t fake this dinner, Amato. Her palate is almost certainly educated.”

Amato giggled. “I remember advice from Mr. Chambrun on another occasion,” he said. “Kangaroo tail soup, specially flown in from Australia. It is unbelievably foul-tasting, but the guests will eat every last drop of it, smacking their lips, lest somebody should guess that they have no experience of exotic dishes.”

“I think if it wasn’t delicious the lady would complain,” I said. “I don’t think her aim is to impress.”

Amato took a slip of paper out of his pocket. “Aged beef is a problem these days,” he said. “I was prepared to suggest roast venison
grand veneur.
I would precede it with special salmon flown in from the Canadian Northwest.”

“I think you should discuss it with the Baroness,” I said. “It will keep you from guessing. I think she is altogether capable of saying yes or no. It should save you a lot of anxiety—and at least three Bromo Seltzers.”

“You think I will not find her difficult?” he asked, little beads of sweat showing on his long upper lip.

“I think you will find her unlike anyone you’ve dealt with before, chum. But I suggest you put off seeing her at least until tomorrow. She’s in an unhappy state this evening.”

“The dog. I heard about the dog,” Amato said. “It’s unbelievable.”

“I saw it,” I said.

“Thank God it was not me,” Amato said, his ulcer obviously twitching. “Thank you for your advice, Mr. Haskell.”

“I hope I haven’t misled you,” I said.

At the door Amato turned back. “With the kangaroo tail soup you serve a Madeira sercial,” he said.

For a man who couldn’t eat food his obsession with it was slightly comic. …

Shelda has moments of infantilism. They appear almost always when she’s mad at me and thinks she can get even by making me jealous. She was reading a copy of
Life
when I let myself into her apartment. Have I admitted that I have a key?

“He’s really quite masculine,” she said, not looking up.

“Who? Cary Grant?”

“Don’t be a dope!” she said. “I’m talking about Peter Wynn, of course.”

“You have reason to be certain?”

She gave me an evil little grin. “I was offered the opportunity.”

“Fast worker, your Mr. Wynn.”

“At the crucial moment we were interrupted,” Shelda said. And then she stopped playing games. “Oh, Mark, who could have done such a thing to that poor little dog?”

“Someone not nice,” I said. “Was the news of that what interrupted Mr. Wynn’s pass at you?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” Shelda said. “He didn’t make a pass at me. He was politely admiring, which does a girl good.”

“How did he take the news about Puzzi?”

“He said, ‘That sonofabitch!’ and left me flat.”

“Which sonofabitch?”

“He didn’t say. Do they know who did it, Mark?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But depend on Chambrun and Jerry. They’ll find out.” I lit a cigarette. “There are no lines or wrinkles,” I said. “Can you suggest how she does it?”

“Monkey glands,” she said, bitterly.

“They went out in the twenties.”

“She’s hooked you!”

“Yes and no,” I said. “She’s fascinating. She’s also scary.” I made us a pair of Scotch on the rocks, and then I brought her up to date. It took two drinks to get through Sam’s stories about Charmian, with Shelda interrupting like the commercials on TV. I’d just finished the story of Sam’s father when the telephone rang. Shelda answered and then handed the phone to me. “Jerry Dodd for you.”

“You’ve found the dognapper?” I asked him.

“We’ve graduated to people,” he said, in a strange, hard voice. I scarcely recognized it.

“What do you mean?”

“The Baroness’ maid,” he said. “The little blond dish they call Heidi.”

“What about her?”

“She went to the corner drugstore to do an errand for the Baroness. Someone grabbed her, dragged her into an alley, bashed in her skull, and slashed her to pieces with a dull knife.”