An Inconvenient Woman (9 page)

“Of course. What’s your name?”

“Flo.”

“Flo what?”

“Flo M.,” she replied, emphasizing the
M
.

“Oh, yes, sorry. I’m a little lax in the anonymity department sometimes,” said Philip.

“You shouldn’t be. I abide by the rules. No last names in AA.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m Philip Quennell.”

“K,”
she corrected him. “You’re Philip
K.
”

“No, not K. Q,” he said. “I’m Philip Q.”

“Well, I was never much of a speller,” said Flo, smiling. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked.

“No.”

“Some of these people freak out. They’ve got so many no-smoking meetings now. This is the main reason I come to this one, at this ungodly hour of the morning—because I can smoke.”

She opened a bag that hung from her shoulder on a gold chain and took out a gold cigarette case. Philip noticed that her name, Flo, was spelled out in sapphires on the top. “I’d give up smoking, but I love this cigarette case too much to put it in a drawer and never use it again.” She lit her cigarette with a matching gold lighter.

“That’s not a good enough reason,” said Philip.

“For me it is,” replied Flo. “I get a charge every time I open this pretty case. When I was still doing drugs, I used to carry joints in it.”

Philip laughed. He was about to ask her another question, about Hector Paradiso, when the meeting started. Flo moved to a chair in the row behind him. Neither raised a hand to participate in the meeting, but each paid careful attention
to the speaker and to the people who raised their hands to share.

At the end of the meeting, during the prayer, Philip looked around at Flo. She was saying the Lord’s Prayer with her eyes closed, holding the hands of the person on each side of her, with a cigarette dangling from her lips.

“Will I see you at the Rodeo Drive meeting on Friday night?” he asked, as they were leaving the meeting.

“Oh, no, I never go to the Rodeo Drive meeting. Or the Cedars-Sinai meeting on Sunday mornings either. Too social for me. This is the meeting I like. You never see anyone you know.”

Philip, puzzled, nodded. “You wouldn’t want to have dinner one night, would you?”

Flo looked at him and smiled. “No, I’m spoken for,” she said.

He nodded, understanding. “I wasn’t coming on, if that’s what you were thinking,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” said Flo, smiling, with a hand-on-hip gesture.

Philip laughed. “Is that what you thought?”

“The idea had crossed my mind,” she answered. “You’re not exactly hard to look at, you know.”

“Neither are you,” he said. “But that wasn’t what I had in mind, really. I thought it would be nice to have a cup of coffee and talk.”

“Oh, I see. We’ve moved down the scale from dinner to a cup of coffee, have we? To discuss sobriety, is that it? Hey, good line, Phil Q. I bet it works. Most of the time.” She smiled at him and waved good-bye with a left-handed circular gesture and a toss of her red hair. He watched her as she walked away from him up Robertson Boulevard. There was a sway to her walk that he could not help but admire. Whether she meant it to be provocative or not, it was. Philip could imagine that she had been whistled at in her day. She turned into a parking place in front of an outdoor furniture shop that was not as yet open for business. She got into a red convertible Mercedes-Benz. He wondered where her money came from.

That day Philip Quennell was to have his first meeting with Casper Stieglitz, for whom he was to write a documentary on the proliferation of drugs in the film industry. Casper Stieglitz had an office at Colossus Pictures in the San Fernando Valley.
Once a studio unto itself in Hollywood, Colossus now occupied part of the lot that used to be called the Warner Bros. Studios. Philip, unused to the freeways, and armed with a map provided by the Chateau Marmont, left an hour before his appointment for fear that he might get lost on the drive from West Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley. Much to his surprise, he found the studio with no difficulty at all, and was thirty-five minutes early for his appointment. Not wanting to inconvenience Casper Stieglitz, he decided to find a diner or coffee shop and have another cup of coffee rather than arrive too early. He pulled into the parking lot of a House of Pancakes. On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, there were bins for the Hollywood trade papers, the
Reporter
and
Daily Variety
, as well as several city newspapers that Philip, being new to the city, had never heard of. Thus far, he had only seen or heard of the
Times
and the
Tribunal
. He put a quarter in one of the bins and took out a paper called the
Valley Sentinel
.

Sitting at the counter drinking a cup of coffee, he found an article on the third page of the first section that read, “Death of Millionaire Socialite.” The facts in the piece were minimal. Hector Paradiso, descendant of a Spanish Land Grant family, had been found dead “under mysterious circumstances” in his Humming Bird Way house. Several shots had been fired. Cyril Rathbone, the social columnist for
Mulholland
, who described himself as Hector’s closest friend, was quoted as saying about him, “He was like a Spanish don.” Rose Cliveden, who was called a Los Angeles socialite, said by telephone from her home in Holmby Hills, “He was my lifelong friend. The world has lost a courtly gentleman.” A Mexican houseboy, Raymundo Perez, who had been questioned by the police and released, was quoted as saying, “Mr. Paradiso was helping me get my green card. He was a very generous man.”

“More coffee?” asked the waitress behind the counter.

Philip looked at his watch. It was getting close to the time of his appointment with Casper Stieglitz. “No, thank you,” he said. He ripped the page out of the paper and put it in his pocket, grabbed the check, left a tip, and dropped the money on the counter of the cashier’s desk.

Driving up to the gates of Colossus Pictures, he felt awed by the prospect of entering a Hollywood studio for the first time. At the guard’s booth, he said, “I have an appointment with Casper Stieglitz. My name is Philip Quennell.”

The guard was wearing dark glasses and did not reply. He picked up the telephone, consulted a list, and dialed an extension.

“I have a Mr. Quennell here to see Mr. Stieglitz,” he said.

“Could I pull into that space over there?” asked Philip, pointing to an empty parking space.

“You do, and you’ll be talking in a soprano voice,” said the guard. “That’s Marty Lesky’s space.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Philip. Even Philip knew that Marty Lesky was the head of Colossus Pictures.

Philip could hear a person rattling on at the other end of the guard’s telephone call to Casper Stieglitz’s office. Bettye the chatterbox, probably, he thought. The guard hung up the telephone. “Bettye says to tell you Mr. Stieglitz had an unexpected appointment off the lot this morning and would like you to meet him instead at his house late this afternoon, for drinks.”

“But I don’t know where Mr. Stieglitz lives,” said Philip.

“Bettye says call her when you get back to your hotel,” said the guard.

Flo’s Tape #5

“
I was going to live in Brussels when Jules went over there to head the American delegation during the year of the statehood of Europe. I’m sure you know all about that. There’s going to be only one currency, like we have here in this country, no more French francs and Italian lire and German marks, and all that stuff. I can’t remember what they’re going to call the new money, but it’s all going to be the same from one European country to the next
.

“
Jules had this apartment already picked out for me on the Avenue Hamoir, I think it was called. It was supposed to be a good address in a good neighborhood in Brussels. Of course, Jules and Mrs. Mendelson had taken a very swell house on the Avenue Prince d’Orange. I hope you notice my French accent on the Prince d’Orange. He sent me to French lessons at Berlitz.

“
I mean, the guy really did a lot for me. I’ll say that for him
.”

R
ose Cliveden said it for everyone when she said, “Everyone adored Hector,” to a reporter from the
Valley Sentinel
who quizzed her as she was going into Hector Paradiso’s funeral. Rose, however, was never able to settle for anything so simple as a three-word answer to anything and added, quite unnecessarily under the circumstances, “He didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

“Except one,” said the reporter.

Rose glared at him through her dark glasses, with what she meant to be a withering look.

The reporter, knowing he had gotten to her, pressed further. “It only takes one.”

“Excuse me,” said Rose grandly, and proceeded past the reporter up the steps of the Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills, trying to catch up with Pauline and Jules Mendelson, who had walked past the reporter without replying. Still using a cane, because of her broken toe, she stopped inside the vestibule to gaze about.

“Did you ever see such a crowd?” Rose said to Madge White at the holy water font, dipping in her white glove and making the sign of the cross in a single sweeping gesture. “There’s Loretta Young. Doesn’t she look marvelous? And Ricardo and Georgiana Montalban. Look, Cesar Romero. All the Catholic stars are here. They all loved Hector. Jane Wyman couldn’t come. She’s shooting her series, and you know Janie. Work, work, work. But she sent beautiful flowers. Yellow lilies, from Petra. Oh, there’s Faye Converse.” She waved hello to Faye Converse and one or two others, all the time maintaining a properly solemn face. “Poor Hector,” she repeated over and over.

The church was filled beyond capacity. Those unable to
obtain seats, or standing room, or space in the choir loft, remained outside on the church steps or on the lawn. Monsignor McMahon later said, at Rose Cliveden’s lunch at the Los Angeles Country Club, that only at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve had the crowds been comparable. It was not that Hector Paradiso had been that great a man in life, or even that beloved. It was the bizarre circumstance of his death that created all the momentary excitement, far more than the death of a more important person would have caused, and people came who had only a passing acquaintance with Hector, or even none at all, and only wanted to stare at the grand or celebrated friends of the dead man.

All the ushers were old friends, but Rose decided to wait for Freddie Galavant, who looked so distinguished, she thought, in a gray suit that matched his hair, to take her up the aisle to her place. Freddie had been given an ambassadorship to a Latin American country during the previous administration, a reward for campaign funds raised, and his presence as an usher, together with Winthrop Soames, Sandy Pond, Sims Lord, and Ralph White, indicated the importance of Hector Paradiso in the community, although none of the men had been known to be particularly close to him. “Their wives were,” Rose had said, when the plans were being drawn up. Jules Mendelson, stating that he was not a Catholic, had refused to give the eulogy. Jules said that Freddie Galavant, who still liked to be called Ambassador Galavant, would be far better in that capacity than he, although Freddie was not a Catholic either.

The person most put out by the choice of Ambassador Galavant as eulogist was Cyril Rathbone, the society columnist for
Mulholland
. Cyril Rathbone thought of himself as Hector Paradiso’s closest friend and the natural choice to speak at the service. Cyril was known to be entranced with the sound of his own mellifluous English voice, and he imagined himself, from the moment he first heard of Hector’s death, speaking beautiful thoughts from the altar of the Church of the Good Shepherd in the presence of the group he most admired in the city, particularly Pauline Mendelson, who had thus far resisted his charms. But his offer was declined by the funeral planners, Jules Mendelson in particular, when Sims Lord, Jules’s lawyer, came up with the information that a morals charge was pending against Cyril. “A beating of some sadomasochistic variety,” said Sims.

“That’s all we need,” said Jules, when he heard this news. “Freddie, you do it.”

“But I hardly knew Hector,” said Freddie Galavant.

“We’ll fill you in,” said Jules, ending the discussion and solving the problem. He was used to not having his decisions questioned, even by ambassadors.

Rose was seated, finally, in the row behind Camilla Ebury, next to Pauline and Jules. Although Philip Quennell had ridden to the church in a limousine with Camilla, he chose not to sit in the front row with her, feeling that he was too new a friend to take such a prominent position. Camilla understood, and Pauline, who observed the moment of Philip’s removing himself to a seat farther back, admired the good taste of the young man. She leaned forward in her pew and whispered into Camilla’s ear, “Be sure to bring Philip back to the house afterwards.” Camilla smiled and patted Pauline’s hand.

Rose whispered to Pauline, “Aren’t the flowers lovely?” Pauline, praying, nodded her approval without involving herself in conversation, knowing that Rose enjoyed whispered conversations. Rose could not stand funeral wreaths and had instructed Petra von Kant, the florist her group all used—“She knows us all, she knows what we like”—to decorate the church with birch trees and great baskets of yellow and pink tulips and hyacinths, knowing that all the real friends of Hector would order their flowers through Petra. The others, the wreaths of gladiolus and carnations, with starched ribbons and gold lettering, the sort of flowers and arrangements that Rose and her friends abhorred, had been placed on the side altars, so as not to cause disharmony in the color scheme that Rose had worked out with Petra. Only the enormous spray of white phalaenopsis, which had come from Pauline Mendelson’s greenhouse at Clouds, broke with Petra’s scheme; but, as everyone knew, Pauline knew more about orchids than anyone in the city, and Pauline had been the friend that Hector liked best. Her spray had been placed on top of Hector’s mahogany coffin.