The Twenty-Year Death (39 page)

She was on the side of the bed nearest us, propped up on
throw pillows of varying sizes, all with gilt tassels and somber colors except for the pillow just below her head, a normal pillow in a normal white pillowcase, good for sleeping no matter your station. The bedclothes had been pulled back on that side of the bed to form a nice triangle of exposed sheet. She hadn’t pulled the covers back over herself. Her right hand lay on the white cloth. A handkerchief had been wrapped around her wrist, and I had no doubt there was one on the other wrist as well. The whole scene looked like a sick room out of a movie, and I wondered if wherever Chloë Rose was it always looked like a movie.

Miguel went to her side. “Miss Rose, Miss Rose, it’s Mr. Foster. He’s here to help.” She didn’t stir. He looked back at me with open honest eyes filled with worry. It was plain that he was in love with her. It was a bad thing for him to be.

I stepped past him and took her right hand. I turned it over and unwound the white handkerchief from her wrist. Either she hadn’t been very serious about dying or she didn’t know what she was doing. There were two jagged cuts across her wrist, not up it, and they intersected as though she had been unsure of the first one and tried again. They were more than superficial, but they wouldn’t need stitches. The blood had already clotted, and there was hardly more than a small rusty stain on the handkerchief. I reached across her for the other one just to make sure. It was the same.

As I replaced her left hand, her eyes flickered, and she said something in French in the dull dreamy voice of the drugged. She said a little bit more, and then opened her eyes again, this time enough to maybe see me. She switched to English then. “I’m not dead.”

“Did you hope to be?” I said.

She closed her eyes and licked her lips. “Could I please have some water?”

Miguel went around the bed to the bathroom. There was the sound of the sink going on and then off, and he brought the glass to her. He had to put it in her hand, and once he did she just held it, resting the glass on the bed, making no effort to actually drink.

“If you want to kill yourself by slitting your wrists,” I said, “you need to cut along the veins up your forearm. That’s how you’ll bleed out. Slashing across your wrists will just hurt more than anything else.”

“I wondered,” she said, “why there was so little blood.”

“Why do you want to kill yourself? Because you’ve got an alcoholic husband and some policemen weren’t very nice to you?”

Miguel shifted behind me, and I knew that he wasn’t happy with the way I was talking to her. Well, he had called me, so I was what he was going to get.

She shook her head back and forth on the pillow, slowly.

“You want to go to a hospital?” I said. “You think that’ll get you away from all of this?”

“I don’t want a hospital,” she said, a petulant child. “I don’t want anything. I don’t want to be alive.”

“You can quit playing Madame Bovary,” I told her. “Nobody really thinks you have anything to do with this murder. The police just want to catch a few headlines.”

“It’s not about the police.” Her voice was stronger now. It sounded more like a cornered animal than an injured one.

“Maybe at Merton Stein they like it when you pull your prima donna act, it makes them feel like they’ve got a real star, but out here, it’s not getting you anything.”

“You think this is an act?”

“Mister Foster,” Miguel said behind me.

“Yeah. I think you’re feeling upstaged by a dead starlet who was having an affair with your husband. You’ve got to remind everyone you’re around, but all you got was a Mexican and me.”

“Mister Foster,” Miguel said again, putting his hand on my elbow now.

“No,” Chloë Rose said, throwing the water glass. She only had enough strength to get it a foot or so away from the bed. The water splashed my pant leg. She was shaking her head. “No. No, no, no. I have no one anymore. My mother...my father... Now my husband, too. I have nobody! Nobody wants me.”

Miguel left then. Probably going back to his stash of medicine.

“What about your adoring fans? Hell, I’m waiting for your next picture.”

She just kept shaking her head.

Miguel was back then with another glass of water and some pills cupped in his palm. I held up my hand to prevent him from going forward. “She’s had enough of that.”

She pushed what covers were on her off and stood, but she was unsteady on her feet and she fell against me. “Hold me,” she said. I put my arms around her. It hurt like hell.

Our faces were inches apart. Her eyes were desperate, urgent with need. Did she want me to kiss her? With her husband missing and her doting houseboy watching?

I held her away from me, one hand on each of her arms. “I know a private place,” I said. “The Enoch White Clinic. I had some dealings with them a year or so back when I was working a missing persons and the missing person turned up...unwell. They’re good, professional, real doctors.”

“You think I need to go to hospital?”

“You think you’re fine here?”

She rested her head against my chest. “I’m not fine anywhere.”

“I’ll ring them right up. They’ve got people on call any time of the day or night. I bet they can be here within the hour.”

She looked back up at me, and now she was scared.

“It’ll be all right,” I said, although I didn’t know if it would.

“But what happened to Mandy...”

“The police are looking into it. Sometimes they surprise you and do their job.”

“You said the police only want headlines, not killers.”

Throwing my own words back at me. I was as crazy as she was to go on talking to her. But up close like that she smelled so nice. A man could get distracted by that.

She straightened a fold in my shirt, studying the weave intensely. “If you would look into it, I would feel so much better. Everyone else seems out for themselves. I’m frightened.”

“I’ve been warned away from this thing by more people in more ways than I would care to list.”

She looked up at me without moving her head. Her eyes glistened, just like they did at that crucial moment in all of her pictures. “Please,” she said, breathing the word so I could feel it on my lips.

I bent down and mashed my lips against hers. It wasn’t right, but I did it anyway, and I won’t say I’m sorry. When we broke apart, I said, “Why does Daniel Merton want to buy your horse?”

Her brow crumpled, and she took a step back, both hands still on my chest. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

She shook her head, confused, and I could see the hysteria setting back in.

Miguel said, “Mr. Foster, I think you should leave.”

We ignored that.

“When did he give you the horse,” I said.

She still shook her head. “Four months ago, maybe five.”

“Does he often give you things like that?”

“On occasion. When a picture does well. He does it with all of his actresses. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Has he ever asked for a present he’s given you back before?”

She pressed her lips together, and shook her head. Maybe this time it meant no. “I don’t understand, why are you asking me these things?”

“Miss Rose,” Miguel said.

“Forget it,” I said, and then I leaned in, and she met me, and I kissed her again, smelling flowers and something behind the flowers that was really her.

This time when we parted, she said, “Promise me you’ll help Mandy.”

“I’ll try,” I said, because I was a fool.

She collapsed in my arms, going limp, and I struggled to hold her. I leaned her back so that she sat down on the bed, and then I turned back to Miguel, indicating that he should step in and take over. He wouldn’t look at me. He took her arm and leaned down for her legs, helping her back onto the bed. There was a phone on the night table and I picked it up to call the clinic. They did the bulk of their business giving people the cure, booze and dope, but they handled all variety of mental disorders. I couldn’t tell if Chloë Rose had a problem beyond an artistic bent, but if she was suicidal, she needed more than a Mexican with a pill bottle and a stack of handkerchiefs to sop up her blood. The nurse on the phone assured me that they’d be right over.

Miguel had gotten her back in the bed, and was holding a
new glass of water to her lips. I didn’t see if he had given her the pills too. I went back out into the hall, feeling that I had done what I could and a lot that I shouldn’t have, and wondering how I had put myself back into this thing right when I should have been walking out. Miguel joined me in a moment.

“Don’t be sore at me,” I said. “I didn’t mean for any of it to go that way in there.”

“We’re all doing our jobs,” he said.

I was too exhausted to fight with him.

“These doctors that you called? Will they call the police?”

“No. And they’ll do all they can to keep the police from her—to keep everyone from her, really.”

He nodded as though that was satisfactory. We went back downstairs and smoked cigarettes in silence while we waited. When the men in white came, they were quick, cool, and professional. We watched Chloë Rose, the great star, led into the back of the white van that read “Enoch White Clinic” in red with a caduceus along the side. They pulled away with her.

“Tell Rosenkrantz where she went, if he ever comes back,” I said. “He can call me if he wants to.”

Miguel didn’t say anything. I didn’t care. I set a brisk pace to my car, got in, made it to my apartment building, and fell on the mattress without taking off my shoes.

I missed the sunrise and missed most of what people call morning. I had to get undressed before I could get dressed again, which only hurt a little. No more than getting gored by a bull. I decided that I needed a proper breakfast. I brought out most of what was in the refrigerator and fried it in butter while the coffee brewed and then ate the whole mess in a little less time than it took to cook it. It was eleven o’clock. I had the vague sense that at some point the previous night, I had promised Chloë Rose that I would find Mandy Ehrhardt’s killer. I distinctly remembered getting thrown off that very case by no less than three people, some more emphatic than others. And I didn’t know if Greg Taylor’s death tied in to all of this, but with Chloë Rose and Stark in the same picture, it felt a little too close for comfort. When you added that all up, I guessed there wasn’t much to do except to go see if any more paint had peeled off of the walls in my office.

The waiting room at my office appeared empty when I opened the door. The standing ashtray had the usual number of butts plus the one that Knox had added the day before. The layer of dust on the rough burgundy upholstery was undisturbed. It was the appearance of no business, which was business as usual. I closed the outer door and turned to face the space behind it.

“That’s far enough,” Benny Sturgeon said, holding a .32 automatic in his right hand. The barrel pointed at me.

“When you want to hide in doorways, Mr. Sturgeon, it’s best to leave off the aftershave,” I said, like I was an expert at hiding in doorways.

He took a quick step towards me, but when I didn’t move, he stepped back again. “I’m the one who’s going to do the talking, you get me?”

I laughed, and the hard expression on his face turned to pained confusion.

“I’ve got a gun here,” he said.

“You’ve been watching too many of your own movies.”

I turned away from him to go to my office door.

“That’s far enough,” he said.

“You said that already,” I reminded him while getting the key out and fitting it into the door. “When you want to threaten somebody, it’s best to have the safety catch off. It makes the whole thing more effective.”

He moved behind me, but I ignored him. Hollywood. The talent was crazy and the people behind the scenes were crazier. I opened the office door, and flicked on the overhead light.

There was a man standing against the opposite wall with his arms over his chest. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“My partner,” a voice said behind me. “McEvoy. You met yesterday.”

“How do you do,” McEvoy said, bobbing his head.

“Samuels,” I said, and turned to see him. “You couldn’t wait out front like a civilian would? You’ve got to break into my office?”

“It’s not breaking in when there’s probable cause,” Detective Samuels said. “You’re suspected of interfering with a police
investigation.” He looked over at Sturgeon, who had come in, his gun still outstretched. “You can drop that, Sturgeon,” Samuels said.

“Don’t mind him,” I said. “It’s just a prop. You’ve got blanks in there, don’t you, Sturgeon?”

His hand dropped to his side and he was the same ineffectual man who had tried to hire me the day before. “Yes. They’re blanks.”

“And the safety’s on,” Samuels said.

“Okey, the damn safety’s on!” Sturgeon said.

I nodded my chin at Samuels. “You mind if I sit down? I’ve kind of been running around the past few days.” I went around my desk, pulled out the chair, and sat down like I was all alone, bringing my hands up behind my head and resting it on both of my palms. Samuels was still staring at the director. “What are you doing here?”

Sturgeon looked around at each of us like he was going to ask for directions.

“He came by yesterday,” I said. “He wanted to hire me to work the Ehrhardt murder. He had this crazy idea that you wanted Chloë Rose for the spot. I told him I’d already been warned off of that case and anyway I’ve got a job going and I only work one job at a time. So he came back to change my mind.”

“You know, I never saw his lips move,” Samuels said, eliciting a choked-off laugh from his partner.

“Is that what it was all about?” Samuels said to Sturgeon. “You thought you could scare the peeper into working this case?”

Sturgeon nodded. “Yes. It’s all exactly as Mr. Foster says.”

“What, you don’t trust the cops?” McEvoy said.

“Do you?” I said.

“Okay, enough from you,” Samuels said. “You know, Foster,
the other morning I liked you all right, and I’m not a man who likes peepers.”