Night Night, Sleep Tight (21 page)

“And you said?”

“I said I didn’t know.”

Of course Henry didn’t know. God forbid he’d take the time to pay her a visit and see for himself.

“Which made me think,” Henry continued, “I should come down one weekend. See the gallery. Meet your business partner. See your house. Would you have room if I wanted to stay over?”

Shocked, it took Deirdre a moment to come up with an answer. “Of course there’s room. I’ll make room. You can even bring Baby and Bear.”

The dogs, sleeping next to each other in the corner, picked up their heads. They seemed as surprised as Deirdre.

Chapter 38

L
ater that night, Deirdre heard a canned laugh track rumbling from her father’s bedroom. Sounded as if her mother, who’d lived for the last ten years without television, was catching up on the latest sitcoms. Deirdre crept out into the hall and knocked lightly on Henry’s bedroom door. When there was no answer, she knocked again. “Henry?” she whispered.

“Go away. I’m sleeping.”

“Henry,” Deirdre said through the closed door, “I was there at the house the night Tito was killed, and I know you were there, too.”

No response.

“Are you listening to me? I know you were the one who was driving Daddy’s car. You may not want to talk about it, but—”

The door opened. Henry had a pair of earphones loose around his neck. “Shh,” he said. He let her into his room and pressed the door shut behind her.

“Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened?” Deirdre said.

Henry sat down on the edge of the bed, his shoulders slumped. “I had to get us both out of there. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry?
Those were two words she never thought she’d hear coming out of her brother’s mouth, and certainly not with the kind of genuine contrition that seemed to fuel them now. “I thought Dad came to get me out of there.”

“I had no idea she’d even called him. I found you passed out on the floor in one of the upstairs bathrooms. I had to practically carry you down the back stairs and I was afraid I’d have to carry you all the way home. But when I got outside, Dad’s car was right there, with the keys in the ignition. The answer to a prayer. Or that’s what I thought at the time.” He gave a tired smile and shook his head. “I put you in the car. You were so out of it. I reclined the seat and you curled over on your side.”

“You said, ‘Night night, sleep tight’ and kissed me on the forehead. I thought you were Daddy.”

Henry blushed. “What I should have done is belted you in. Believe me, I wish to hell I had. And I wish to hell that I’d stopped long enough to put up the convertible top and calm down. But I was so angry and so—” He broke off, a guarded look crossing his face. “Anyway, I got behind the wheel and started the car.”

“Why did you drive up into the canyon?”

“I just drove. I wasn’t even thinking about where I was going. Before I knew it, I’d turned onto Mulholland. I was cranking, pushing the car, taking those turns just as fast as I could.”

Speed. Deirdre understood how it focused the senses. Obliterated second thoughts.

“I lost control. The car crashed into the guardrail. It was so weird, the car came to a dead stop but the engine just kept screaming. I thought I had my foot on the brake but I was practically standing on the gas pedal. The steering wheel was bent and my chest hurt so badly I could barely breathe. When I looked across to see if you were okay, your seat was empty. I’ll never forget that moment.”

“Then what? You thought you could just walk away and leave me there?”

“No! God, no. I was frantic. I heard you crying. I crawled through the underbrush and found you. Then I scrambled back and flagged down some bikers. Told them I’d been hitchhiking and witnessed a crash. I begged them to go call for help. All I could think was that you were going to die and it would be my fault. But then, when the ambulance got there, I hid.”

“You hid? Why?”

“They’d have—” Henry mumbled something.

“They’d have what?”

“Taken away my driver’s license.”

“Taken your . . . ? I’m lying there, I could have been dying for all you knew, and you were worried about losing your damned driver’s license?”

Henry looked down at the floor and swallowed. The years seemed to fall away and Deirdre could see the vulnerable sixteen-year-old he’d been: tall and charming, goofy and sweet. “I know. I was a coward. I was a jerk.” He looked mortified. “You should hate me.”

But Deirdre didn’t hate him. All she felt at that moment was sadness. “You were a kid. Kids do incredibly stupid things.”

“That was beyond stupid and then some. And it wasn’t just about losing my license. The truth is, I was afraid they’d find out where I’d been and what I’d been up to.” Agitated, Henry got up and crossed the room, then crossed back. He stopped and looked at Deirdre. “Did he write about me and her? Did he?” Before she could answer, he went back to pacing the room. “I knew I should stop seeing her. Tito threatened to kill me if he caught me there again. But she’d whistle and back I’d come. Like some kind of trained puppy. Sit up. Roll over. Sit in my lap. Give us a kiss.”

Deirdre tried to put together what Henry was saying. “You came to see her after the party?”

Henry stood still. “I did. She’d told me to meet her at the pool. I rode over on my bicycle. On my
bike,
for Chrissake. At the last minute, I grabbed a knife, thinking I’d flash it at Tito if he showed up. I got to the pool and waited and waited. She never came.”

After the party. That was when Deirdre and Joelen were making themselves sick gorging on leftovers, finishing off drinks, and smoking cigarette butts. “She didn’t come because we’d gotten smashed. Threw up. Passed out.”

“You and Joelen?” Henry blinked. Then he barked a laugh. “You thought I had a thing for Joelen?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I . . . I guess I did. Sort of. But not like that.”

Not like that?
Then she got it. Of course it hadn’t been Joelen. A wave of pity and disgust came along with the realization. “You were meeting Bunny Nichol?”

Henry put his hands to his face and closed his eyes. An image of him came back to her. Onstage with his guitar and a microphone in front of him, an ambitious kid swaggering with unearned experience. And Bunny, twenty years older.
Queen of wanton amorous fire,
as her father had described her in his memoir. “What a sleazy—” She couldn’t finish.

“I guess that’s how it looks now. At the time, it was amazing. I thought I was such a big deal. Supersuave. In charge.”

“Oh, Henry. She seduced you. She was glamorous. A famous movie star, for God’s sake.” Deirdre could only imagine what would have happened if people had found out. Bunny Nichol, involved with a younger man—that might have made a few waves. But that she was sleeping with a sixteen-year-old kid? A tsunami of bad press and ill will, and probably the end of her career. “Did you come up to the house looking for her?”

Henry looked sick. “I did. Even from outside the house I could hear them arguing. She was shouting. Tito bellowing. Then just her, screaming and screaming.

“I ran into the house. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but I ran inside. I can remember standing at the base of the stairs, looking up. They weren’t arguing anymore. Now there was complete silence, so quiet I could hear my own heart pounding.

“Then Bunny was there, like she’d just materialized on the upstairs landing, cold as ice. She came down and took away the knife. I didn’t even realize I was holding it. She told me to get the hell out of there, to take you with me, and not to even think about coming back. Ever. So that’s what I did. Except the not thinking part. It took me a long time to stop doing that.”

Deirdre felt ashamed that for all these years she’d just assumed Henry was Teflon, holding every girlfriend who came along at arm’s length emotionally. They came and then they went at his whim, or so it had seemed. This, at least, explained why.

“Did you know why they were fighting? That she’d told him she was pregnant?”

Henry narrowed his eyes. “How do you know that?”

“Sy told me.”

“And he knew because . . . ?”

“Bunny told him. He came over later and she had him call the police.”

“No. I didn’t know that.” Henry shook his head.

“But you did know she was pregnant.”

“I didn’t find out until later, when the baby was born and she came to Dad to negotiate terms and Sy set up the trust. She said the baby was mine. All you have to do is look at Jackie to know that’s true.”

Of course. She’d seen the resemblance too. She’d felt that frisson of recognition when she first saw Jackie Hutchinson standing on the stairs. There had been something about him. The way he carried himself, his sardonic smile, his hair—all of them echoes of Henry.

“Jackie knows you’re his dad?”

“He thinks I’m a friend of the family, and that’s what I’ve tried to be. It’s the one good thing that came out of that mess. He’s a great kid, even if he is a little lost right now.”

That made two lost boys, Deirdre thought as she looked around the room. Henry’s prized electric guitars were once again lined up against the wall. Above them on the shelf stood the Battle of the Bands trophies he’d won. Best Band. Best Guitar. He and his buddies had taken top prizes. Henry had had real talent. Looks and charm, too. And he’d been on his way.

But by his senior year of high school, his grades had slipped. He’d stopped playing in the band. Never applied for summer jobs, just hung around, got high, and slept. Gloria and Arthur, distracted by their own unhappiness and Deirdre’s surgeries, had barely noticed. After a few months of college, he dropped out and moved home. And he was still there, lost on the way to a real life.

Now Deirdre understood why her father had kept the mysterious baby announcement that she’d found tucked in with his manuscript. Jackie Hutchinson had been the unnamed baby whose arrival was heralded in the card mailed in an envelope postmarked twenty-one years ago. Of course her father had saved it. He was the baby’s grandfather.

She also understood one of the notes that her father had jotted on the last page of the manuscript:
Sy trust.
Her father hadn’t been paying Bunny hush money. It had been child support. And Arthur had been bound and determined to write about it. He was going to blow the story wide open, and blow away Bunny’s reputation in the process.

Chapter 39

T
he next morning, the dull roar of a vacuum cleaner reached down and hauled Deirdre from a deep sleep. She lay in bed, listening to the nozzle bang against the baseboards in the hallway outside her bedroom. Sounded as if her mother still hated housekeeping and was taking it out on the house.

Deirdre propped herself up on her elbows. It was half past nine already. Rain beat steadily on the window. After her talk with Henry, she’d gone for a drive to clear her head and to find an all-night drugstore where she could buy a disposable camera. Even though she hadn’t gotten to sleep until well past midnight, it was the best night’s sleep she’d had since she found her father’s body floating in the pool.

All these years she’d blamed her father for crippling her when it was Henry who’d been driving. In the end, Henry had been crippled, too, in his own way. The two of them had more in common than she’d ever have imagined.

She got out of bed and took a quick shower. Toweled her hair dry and ran her fingers through it. Her new cut didn’t need more than that.

Beyond her trench coat, she hadn’t thought about what she had to wear to the funeral service. She couldn’t go swanning about the chapel in leggings and a long silk shirt. Her Xeno Art T-shirt was out, too. Ditto her father’s chambray shirt. Which left . . . she poked through the old clothes hanging in the closet and pulled out the navy blue, swingy tent dress that she’d worn in college before abandoning dresses for long paisley skirts or hip-hugging bell-bottoms with embroidered peasant blouses.

She slipped the dress on. It was a little tight on top but it would do. She draped her new scarf loosely around her neck and checked herself out in the full-length mirror. Innocuous. Unremarkable. Perhaps even a little retro chic. The skirt length was the only problem—it was ridiculous how short hems had been back then. But she could live with it. Besides, she’d be wearing a coat over it, so it hardly mattered.

She got her crutch and made her way out into the hall. Gloria was dusting the living room. She was wearing a dark straight skirt and matching shell she’d taken from Deirdre’s closet. Too small for Deirdre, they fit her mother with room to spare.

“Would you stop!” Deirdre said. “No one’s going to expect a perfectly clean house.”

Gloria gave Deirdre an appraising look. “We bought that dress at Robinsons. I like it with that scarf, but—” She came over and removed the scarf from around Deirdre’s neck, then redraped and tied it. “Better.”

Deirdre smiled. There was the shadow of the old Gloria Unger, the woman who had a subscription to
Vogue
and bought her shoes at Delman’s.

“Why don’t you go wake up your brother,” Gloria said.

Henry’s bedroom door was closed. Deirdre rapped on it. “Henry? Henry, wake up!”

“Go away.” Henry’s voice was a barely audible croak.

“The car is coming for us in an hour.”

“I’ll drive myself over.”

“You will not. Now get up!” She waited. Didn’t hear anything. “Henry, are you getting up?” She pushed the door open and looked in.

The covers heaved and she heard the bed creak. “All right, all right. I’m up. Now go away.”

“I’m not going until you’re
up
up.”

Henry picked up his head and glared at her. “I’m not getting up until you get out.”

By the time a dark limousine pulled up, Henry looked sober and handsome in a dark shirt and tie and pressed jeans. Gloria looked oddly chic, certainly striking. Her growing-in hair framed her face like a dark shadow, and she wore her turban unraveled and tied loosely like a cowl around her neck. A pair of Deirdre’s thick, red enameled hoop earrings gave her an exotic, Caribbean look. Her shoes were the only off note—battered black Birkenstock sandals.

Gloria stepped out into the rain, raising the cowl to loosely cover her head as she walked quickly to the car. Henry followed. Deirdre locked the door and carried a large envelope out to the black Cadillac limousine
.

The driver in dark livery, the brim of his cap pulled low over a pair of wraparound sunglasses, held the door open for them. The dark interior of the car was cool and smelled of leather and Old Spice. As the car pulled away from the curb, Deirdre leaned forward and gave the driver Sy’s office address.

“I see you’re going incognito,” Henry cracked, a comment on Deirdre’s belted trench coat, head scarf, and dark glasses. Deirdre ignored him. Henry ignored her ignoring, instead practicing the informal tribute he planned to give, using notecards and talking about what Arthur had taught him to do. Play guitar, drive a car, mix drinks, pick up girls, and take all the fun out of TV movies by providing a running critique of the dialogue. By the time the limo turned into Westwood Village and pulled up in front of the three-story, pink stucco office building that housed Sy’s office, Deirdre was wiping away tears.

“That was perfect,” she told Henry. She was glad she’d had a chance to hear his speech.

“I don’t know why you have to take care of this right now,” Gloria said.

“Sy made me promise I’d leave Dad’s manuscript in his office this morning. It’ll just take me a minute.”

Deirdre got out and speed-walked—as fast as she could with her crutch—out of the rain and in through the arched doorway marked
PUBLIC PARKING
. The interior, with its gated entry and ramp to upper parking levels, smelled of rubber tires and warm, moist pavement. She wondered if this had been the spot where Sy was attacked.

She pushed through a door to the building’s lobby and made her way up a flight of tile-covered stairs, holding on to the wrought-iron railing. Sy’s office was halfway along a shadowy, second-floor corridor that was lit by metal sconces with orangey, flame-shaped glass shades. She took off her sunglasses and unlocked the door with the key Sy had given her.

The moment Deirdre pushed open the door and set her crutch in the dark room, an alarm started to beep. She’d known it would, but still the piercing sound rattled her. She turned on the overhead light and hurried over to the wall where Sy told her she’d find the security panel, though with its flashing lights, she’d have easily found it on her own. She punched in the code and the alarm fell silent.

Deirdre turned on the lights and looked around. On a corner table, a copper lamp with a golden mica shade gave off an eerie glow. This outer room where Vera presided—Arthur used to say she was like a lioness guarding the gate—seemed smaller without Vera in it.

On the wall behind Vera’s desk were two doors. One connected to Sy’s office. The other was a louvered door to a walk-through supply closet. When Deirdre was little, before she started kindergarten even, she often came here with her father. While Sy talked with Arthur, he’d leave both supply closet doors and the connecting office door open so Deirdre could ride her tricycle from Vera’s office to Sy’s and around through the supply closet on her own miniature speedway.

Deirdre stepped into the supply closet, letting the door click shut behind her. Lines of light shined through between the slats in the door on the opposite side. Through the openings she could see Sy’s massive desk, large enough for a pair of law partners to work facing each other. Behind it a pair of casement windows overlooked the street. No coats hung from a coat stand made of deer antlers, the perfect foreground for a large oil painting of a Hollywood western landscape, complete with a cowboy astride a stallion that reared against the sunrise.

At the funeral, Deirdre would let everyone she talked to know exactly where she’d left the memoir. She hoped that the person who’d been looking for it would hear. The closet would be the perfect vantage point from which to watch and see who took the bait. Deirdre slipped the disposable camera that she’d picked up the night before from her pocket, held it up to her face, and aimed the lens through an opening between the louvers. Through the viewfinder she had a perfect view of Sy’s desk. She pressed the shutter.
Click. Whirr.
The film wound itself.

Deirdre left the camera within reaching distance on a shelf and pushed her way through the door at the back of the closet into Sy’s office. A glass bowl filled with cellophane-wrapped peppermints was on the desk. She put her hand into it and felt around for the desk key. It was there, right where Sy said it would be. Then she unlocked the desk’s wide center drawer and placed in it the envelope she’d brought with her. The words, written on the front in dark marker, would be hard to miss:
One Damned Thing After Another by Arthur Unger.

With that, Deirdre locked the desk, just in case someone got there before she got back. She took the key with her and left, rearming the alarm on her way out. When she got down to the lobby, she put her sunglasses back on and tightened her head scarf. Then she exited through the parking garage and out into the drizzling rain. The limo was waiting at the curb.

The driver got out and opened the door for her. “All set?” he whispered.

Even she wouldn’t have recognized Tyler in that uniform and sunglasses.