Everything and More (76 page)

The arching fingers unclenched and lay limp on the wet grass.

Roy, gasping from the struggle, her heart racing wildly, knelt beside Althea. There was a small hole in the tucked silk blouse above the left breast, a thin circle of oozing redness.

Althea lay starkly motionless.

Just as a minute earlier it had been an impossibility for Roy’s mind to accept the handgun, so now her thoughts refused to articulate the word “dead.”

Althea’s hurt badly.

She jumped to her feet. Halfway to the kitchen, where emergency numbers were Scotch-taped inside a cabinet, she thought of Dave Corwin, the young pediatrician who lived across the street. She was trapped in a paralysis of indecision (the phone? the neighbor?); then she swerved, barging out the back door, sprinting down the side of the house and across the street, banging both fists on the black paint of the Corwins’ front door.

Dave answered, barefoot, wearing blue checked Bermudas.

“Accident! A bad accident,” she gasped out. Frantic about deserting Althea, she raced back across the narrow, trafficless street to her house.

At the side gate she halted, staring at the body sprawled on the dichondra. Now she was unable to deny the stonelike rigidity. Althea looks so small, she thought, edging toward the still form. In this short time, the flesh of the serenely vacant face had fallen back from the delicate aquiline nose, the refined, narrow lips had assumed an odd, tilted curve.

The shot must have killed her instantly. Maybe she was dead before she hit the ground.

Dead. . . .

Roy’s knees buckled and she sank over her friend. All of their later ruinous jealousies and divisions were purged from her heart and she was drenched by excruciatingly poignant memories of those distant
days when they had formed a united front against the other adolescents at Beverly High. Their secret jargon . . . the station-wagon door blazoned “The Big Two” . . . the long happy dithering over a lipstick shade at Newberry’s or Thrifty Drugs, the dark enchanted hours shared at the Fox Beverly . . . club sandwiches at Simon’s . . . the hot sands of summer, interminable hours talking on the phone—about what?

Roy bent, pressing a tender kiss on the still-warm forehead.

She was kneeling there, rocking back and forth, when Dave Corwin, barefoot, carrying his bag, rushed through the gate.

*   *   *

The pleasant sounds of Sabbath leisure and chores were drowned by sirens. Motorcycle police arrived, then black-and-white squad cars, an ambulance, a hook and ladder.

The immediate neighbors already milled on the sidewalk in front of Roy’s picket fence. Two members of the LAPD, one black, one Mexican-American, barred further encroaching. At the front door a thickset sergeant tapped his billy club into his palm. The doctor’s wife, feeding her baby his bottle, was surrounded by eddying groups as she repeated over and over what she knew of the dire goings-on at Mrs. Horak’s. “She banged on the door and my husband rushed over—he’s still inside.”

Revolving lights pulsated atop squad cars, police calls barked in a constant staccato.

The sense of high drama peaked with the arrival of a genuine star, Rain Fairburn.

Joshua, his sagging, furrowed face grimly set, double-parked and wrapped a thick arm around Marylin, propelling them through knots of onlookers and reporters—a CBS station wagon had pulled up just ahead of them.

In Roy’s living room, Marylin’s steps faltered. She stared out the window. Roy’s tidy little backyard seemed jammed to overflowing. Jauntily short-sleeved cops, plainclothesmen, photographers flashing vivid light, a couple of medical types in white jackets lounging in the patio chairs drinking Tabs, neighbors gawking from their sides of the six-foot redwood fence.

One of the conferring plainclothesmen moved.

Marylin had a sudden clear view of green grass marked with a drawing, a white figure of a woman that might have been drawn by a child. Inside this outline lay Althea. It was difficult to believe she was dead. She wore a blouse that seemed to be embroidered by peasant hands, a reminder of the adolescent Althea who (with Roy) had outfitted herself in odd costumes.

Then Marylin realized her mistake. The blouse’s rusty pattern was not embroidery but life’s blood.

“Don’t look at it,” Joshua said, pulling her away from the window.

The den was filled with cigarette smoke. A slight, narrow-jawed man, a Tareyton dangling from the corner of his mouth, leaned against the wall as he interrogated Roy. A youngish, balding man clad only in blue check Bermudas sat on the couch next to her.

With her pallor and the streak of blood marking her tan blazer, Roy looked a shaken wreck. As Marylin and Joshua came in, she clutched the hand of the man in shorts as if to introduce him. “This is . . .” Her voice dwindled.

“Dr. David Corwin,” he said.

“God, Dave, I’ve only known you ten years!” Roy said.

The doctor said to Joshua, “I’m the neighbor who phoned you.”

Roy released his hand. “Thank you for hanging in here until they came, Dave,” she said.

“Don’t be silly,” he said, getting to his feet. “If you need me for anything, no matter what, holler across the street. I’ll be there.”

Marylin took his place next to Roy, gripping her sister’s shaking hand in her own trembling one.

Joshua stood over the couch, blocking the two women from the narrow-jawed detective. “You shouldn’t be answering questions, Roy,” he said, the deep, rumbling voice concerned. “I’ve called Sidney Sutherland. Don’t say another word until he gets here.”

The detective nervously took the cigarette from his mouth. “I read Mrs. Horak her rights before she gave her statement.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Roy said mechanically as if repeating the words for the umpteenth time. “Althea came here all upset. She had a gun, but I’m positive she didn’t really intend using it—you know how long we’ve been friends. I tried to take it away. She struggled. There was only one shot. An accident, I’ve told Sergeant Torby all about it. An accident, a horrible, unbelievable accident. . . .”

Marylin put her arm around Roy’s tensely held shoulders, and Roy, crumpling toward her sister, began to cry softly.

A cop in uniform came in and whispered to the narrow jawed plainclothesman, who nodded.

“The gun registration checks with Mrs. Horak’s statement.”

“So?” Joshua asked bellicosely.

“It belonged to the father of the deceased.”

“Then there’s no further need, dammit, to badger Mrs. Horak.”

The ruffle curtained windows let onto the backyard, and masculine
voices drifted into the smoky den. The detective glanced outside. “I have to talk it over with the captain,” he said. “This is a bigger number than I can handle.”

“In other words,” Joshua rumbled, “if the incident hadn’t happened to a member of the puissant Coynes but to one of us peasants, then Mrs. Horak would be free and clear?”

“You and Mrs. Fernauld are hardly in the peasant class, Mr. Fernauld, but that’s just about it.” The plainclothes cop stubbed out his cigarette. “Christ, a Coyne! Why couldn’t this have been my Sunday off?”

*   *   *

The violent death of Althea Coyne Cunningham Firelli Wimborne Stoltz crowded both the Vietnam war and the domestic struggles against it from the evening news. Old photographs of Althea were flashed onto the screen. Only CBS News could boast jerky, hand-held-camera shots of her covered body being wheeled from the garden of a tract house to the waiting ambulance. On radio and television, in the late editions, Althea was tagged in many ways: widow of the famed conductor, heiress to the largest family fortune on the globe, granddaughter of Grover T. Coyne, divorced wife of a distant cousin of the Queen of England, a socialite, a jet-setter, a close friend of Jackie Onassis.

CBS also showed a shot of Rain Fairburn being rushed into the house by Joshua, and another clip of Roy and Marylin, hiding their faces, as they got into Joshua’s Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

“Miss Fairburn’s sister, Roy Horak, owner of an exclusive Beverly Hills women’s shop, reportedly fired the death weapon. She was released on her own cognizance. Her sister, actress Rain Fairburn, hurried her from the scene. Police are evaluating whether criminal charges will be filed. This is Terry Drinkwater reporting from Erica Drive, West Los Angeles.”

  
72
  

There was no question of Roy staying in her own house: she slept at NolaBee’s.

Joshua arranged a press conference—“It’s easiest to satisfy the fourth-estate bastards in one fell swoop,” he said. On the following morning, Monday, he arrived before nine to make sure that coffee, Danish and plenty of name-brand booze were set out. At ten he sat next to Roy in NolaBee’s dining room, once more the joke-slinging, gregarious pro from Hollywood’s Good Old Days when the press was treated to extravagant weekend junkets.

Minicams and Nikons were aimed, tape recorders adjusted, notepads taken out.

“Have you any explanation for Mrs. Stoltz coming to your house with a gun?” asked a frizzy-haired woman.

“Yeah, why would anybody want to shoot anybody?” interjected a stout television man. “You, Rain, and Mrs. Stoltz were three lucky kids.”

“You had everything,” added George Christy from the
Hollywood Reporter.

There was the sound of pencils and ball-points scribbling.

“Did she have any motive?” persisted the frizzy-haired newshen.

“None,” Joshua replied for Roy. “But Mrs. Stoltz had been under a great deal of strain since her father’s death.”

Joshua expertly fielded most of the questions.

After exactly an hour, he pushed to his feet. “That just about wraps it up. Mrs. Horak looks all in—this has been a tremendous strain on her. But we all agree she’s been more than candid and very generous with her time.”

There was a scattering of applause, and everybody, including Joshua, departed.

Roy sank panting onto the living-room couch. But NolaBee’s loquacious concern threatened to smother her. The only escape was to get out of the house.

Roy zigzagged aimlessly along the quiet Beverly Hills streets between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard. Her body ached from the intensity of that struggle for the gun and her strained efforts to ease Althea’s floppy slide to the ground. Her right ankle ached dully from hitting against the sprinkler head. She couldn’t shake off an overpowering sense of guilt. Why had she mailed that dumb, mysterious letter to Charles? Why, when Althea showed up obviously deranged, had she not attempted calming measures, then slipped away to dial Dr. Buchmann for professional advice on how to handle things? Surely there had been a smoother way of getting the gun than trying to wrest it from Althea.
All my fault, my fault,
repeated her silent words.

Sunk into herself, Roy ignored the discomfort of the new patent shoes she’d put on for the press conference until a jagged tenderness in her left heel and right big toe informed her she had blisters. She limped homeward.

In front of NolaBee’s house a nondescript gray coupe was parked.
Another
reporter? she thought. Maybe it’s a sympathy caller. Whoever, I don’t need ’em. She would have kept walking, but with each step the stiff patent dug into the raw flesh, so she hobbled up the narrow cement path.

NolaBee sat in the furniture crowded living room with Charles.

For a moment of sheer masochistic relief, Roy imagined that Charles had come as an accuser to press charges. Charles’s red-streaked eyes and controlled greeting, however, showed no trace of condemnation.

“I just got in,” he said.

She embraced him. “I’m so sorry, Charles. I can’t tell you how torn apart I am.” Tears ran from her eyes.

“You musn’t blame yourself, Roy.” A trite platitude that many had uttered, yet Charles said it firmly.

They pulled apart.

NolaBee’s gossipy voice was already flowing. “Charles says he wants to have a little private talk with you, Roy,” she said. “I’m going in the other room directly. Charles, you will remember, won’t you, to tell your dear grandmother that I’ll drop over to express my sympathies the minute she feels up to it. Your mother was a right fine girl, Charles. What a terrible accident—it just doesn’t seem possible. I cannot believe she’s gone. . . .”