Indiscretions (43 page)

Ignoring Bill’s outstretched hand, he waved him to a chair. “Sit down, Kaufmann. What I have to say will not take long … I’m sure you are a busy man.”

“I can’t think how I can help you, Mr. McBain,” replied Bill, “but just let me know what I can do.…”

“I’ll certainly do that.”

Bill shifted uneasily in the deeply cushioned chair. Why had McBain not shaken hands? What the hell was all this about?

“I’m here to discuss Jenny Haven,” said Fitz, “and the interests of her three daughters.”

Jenny! Jesus Christ, so that was it, those girls had put him up to something.

“A very sad situation,” agreed Bill. “We all felt badly about it, and I’m sure the girls told you that Stan and I—that’s Stan Reubin, the lawyer who died so tragically a couple of months back—well, Stan and I told the girls we would always do whatever we could for them. If they’re in trouble now, I’m sure Stan’s law firm would be glad to honor that promise without any charge.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Kaufmann,” Fitz replied smoothly, “and I hope you, too, will honor your promise.”

Bill felt relief surge through him. So that was it. The girls needed a spot of help, probably got themselves into difficulties already, though if Fitz McBain was helping them, surely it couldn’t be
financial
trouble?

“Damn right I will,” he said heartily. “You know I looked after Jenny’s business for twenty-five years. I’ll be happy to do the same for those poor girls.”

“That’s just it, Kaufmann—those girls
are poor!
And the reason they’re poor is because when Miss Haven began to be somewhat less of a ‘star’ and therefore became
someone who needed more time, more work, and more effort on your part, and also someone considerably less lucrative than she had been to you and Mr. Reubin over the years—
twenty-five years
, I think you said? Well, then, Mr. Kaufmann, you dropped her. You left her to struggle by herself, a woman who’d been looked after, in the business sense, all her working life. You left her to the vultures, Mr. Kaufmann—and they were there, ready and waiting. Ultimately, they included yourself. And Mr. Reubin.” Fitz’s penetrating dark eyes met Bill’s apprehensive brown ones. “As well as Rory Grant.”

Bill’s mouth felt as though all his spittle had dried up, leaving his throat a hoarse desert. His voice rasped like metal on sandpaper as he forced out the word. “Rory?”

Fitz smiled again.

“Rory,” he said pleasantly. “I happened to meet him in Barbados a while ago. A very good-looking young man: such a pleasant, open face, a good smile—perfect for television. And I hear that his role in
Chelsea’s Game
is only the first step up the ladder. Young Rory is on the high road to success, with you hanging on to his coattails!”

Why the hell was he so interested in Rory? worried Bill. Had the bastard been complaining to Fitz McBain that he was being exploited?

“Now, just wait a minute”—anger lent power to his dry throat—“Rory is a client of mine. Everything’s quite legitimate there. Every actor needs an agent, y’know,
and
a lawyer. Why, without us they’d be in a hell of a mess. Believe me, Mr. McBain, we
earn
our money!”

“I’m not interested in how you earn your money from Rory Grant—nor in how much. My concern is with Jenny Haven’s money, the money that was stolen from her by your client, Mr. Grant.” Fitz watched as the expression on Kaufmann’s face dissolved from anger into shock.

“What do y’mean? Rory never stole a cent in his life—”

“And then, of course, we should discuss the considerable sum that would come to the Haven estate from the lawsuit I plan to bring on behalf of the daughters.”

Good God, what was he saying? What had Rory told him? Bill gripped the carved wooden arms of his chair, feeling his heavy signet ring bite into his flesh as it pressed against the wood.

“What lawsuit?” he spluttered. “You’re crazy! Those girls have put you up to something.…”

Fitz walked across to the small tape deck waiting on the table near the Matisse. “Before we go any farther, I think you should hear this.” Pressing the “play” button he stepped back, watching Bill’s reaction as Rory’s distinctive drawl came over the speakers.

“Y’know, Bob, it’s hard for a young guy to make it alone … you’ve never had it bad like me, your family have money. I liked Jenny, y’know, I
really
liked her at first, but she was so tight with the goddamn money. There I was, dressed in Rodeo Drive’s best, without a cent in my pocket. Jesus, I even had to sign
her
name at the goddamn hairdresser’s. I tell you, Bob, that kind of thing can be humiliating to a man.… Anyway she was having business problems, the guy who was her agent and manager had chucked her—she wasn’t earning enough to make it worthwhile for him to jump through the hoop, I guess, and her lawyer was avoiding her calls. She’d begun to manage her own affairs and she hadn’t a clue. I tell you, man, it was too easy
 … I
needed the money and
she
had it. What was so wrong with that? I could have spent as much as I liked on clothes anyway. I know
legally
it was wrong, Bob, but shit! I had to have
some
cash—coke isn’t cheap, you know, and besides, I was seeing a couple of girls from the studios … you know how it is.…”

Bill sat with his head in his hands listening as Rory described how he had taken Jenny’s money. It was unbelievable that he could have been such a goddamn fool. And who the hell was he talking to? Obviously someone he considered a good friend—he kept on repeating that, saying how good it was to have a
friend
he could really talk to, how the whole thing had been on his mind, sometimes he even had dreams about it.…

Fitz pressed the pause button to stop the tape. “I think you should listen to this part carefully,” he suggested, clicking the machine on again.

“I’ve got to tell someone, Bob, and I know I can trust you.…” Rory’s voice was emotional, as though he were on the verge of tears, and Bill felt his stomach tighten in sudden fear. “After I left, Jenny did some checking up. She called me on the set that day, threatened to go to the police. She made me promise to meet her, to talk things over. I meant to go, but we worked late that night. I was messing up my lines because she had me worried, and we were running behind schedule. When I got home it was nine-thirty and Margie was here. She’d picked up some coke for me and she had it all set up … it got a little wild, I was really high, higher than I’ve ever been—but I felt good, y’know, like nothing could get to me now, and Margie was cute. I just kinda forgot Jenny. And then she called—said I’d better get my ass over there, or else! Christ, I wish you could have heard her, Bob, talking to
me
, Rory Grant, like I was some
dumb kid
or something! I told her I wasn’t about to drive all the way to Beverly Hills for no one, so she said okay, the beach house—and
now!
I decided I was gonna tell her where she got off, no old-time movie actress was gonna teach me my manners.… I took Margie’s Seville because my black Ferrari would have been goddamn conspicuous parked outside her beach house. She was there, waiting for me.… I guess it must have been about
three o’clock then, and she could see I was high and it got her mad, really mad. She said she was going to open the windows to get fresh air into my lungs so I could talk straight and I told her not to be such a goddamn
mother
to me—I already had one mother and that was
enough!
She hit me, Bob! Scraped her long goddamn nails all down my cheek—and I had
close-ups
the next day! Jesus, she got me
mad
. I just let her have it—oh, not physically, I didn’t hit her; even stoned I’m not the kinda guy who beats up his women. But I wounded her
verbally
, Bob. I got to her in the way I knew mattered to her most. And ever since, I’ve wondered whether it was because of me she ended up at the bottom of Malibu Canyon.…”

Rory’s voice grew thick with emotion, strangling on a sob as he poured out his fear. “I swear to God I didn’t mean anything by it—they were just words, easy clichés hurled at her in the heat of the moment.… I told her that of course I’d taken the money—why else would I have stayed with her? She was just an old has-been movie star no one wanted anymore. I told her to take a good look in the mirror in daylight—without the backlighting and the makeup. Her body was sagging and her jawline had gone and she still thought she could play the young leading lady … even her agent had left her.
Nobody
wanted to know. She was lucky I’d stayed as long as I did, considering the tight rein she tried to keep me on … of course I’d taken the money. What the hell else did she expect me to do?” There was another long pause and then Rory’s voice came back, quieter this time.

“She just stood there gazing at me with those big blue eyes and I could see the fear in them—fear that I was right, fear for the future … oh, I don’t know. She’d gotten all dressed up to meet me.… I felt suddenly like I was the older one and she was just a kid, all pretty in her sparkly evening dress, a girl at her first prom. She could still look like that, you know, it was nothing to do
with age—it was that she always looked sort of pure and innocent despite that sexy body and the reputation … and she was—innocent, I mean. That’s how I was able to take the money from her, she just believed in everybody. There was no badness in Jenny. I’ll bet even now that if I’d told her I’d done it and I was sorry she would’ve forgiven me. But I’d pushed her too far. She didn’t cry, she didn’t threaten or try to get back at me. ‘That’s that, then,’ she said. She walked to the door and then she turned … she looked as though she’d had a knife twisted in her heart.” Rory’s voice sank to a whisper. “I can’t tell you what she said next, Bob, I just can’t … but I’ll tell you this, it haunts me, it fucking haunts me.… I hadn’t realized what I’d done, what it
meant
to her! She turned and left the house. I heard her start the car.… I could have gone after her, told her I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant it to be like that, that things had just sort of got out of hand.…” There was another pause and then a sigh. “You know what happened next.”

“Are you saying she committed suicide, Rory—because of what you did?”

“I don’t know! Don’t you understand, Bob?
I don’t know!
That’s what keeps me awake at night, and what I dream about when I finally get to sleep—Jenny in her pretty blue dress and the fear in her lovely blue eyes … I feel like some goddamn murderer. The verdict was open, so I’ll never know for sure. Y’know what I’m saying, Bob? I’ll never know if it was because of me. And the stupid thing is that I didn’t think she was a washed-up has-been actress, she was a nice woman—and she was still beautiful. Goddamn, I don’t just screw around with any old woman—Jenny was really something. And she was nice, too good for a shit like me.…”

Rory was choking on his own tears. One of his better performances, thought Bill sourly.

“I never told anybody I’d been at the Malibu house,”
said Rory, pulling himself together. “Nobody knew except Margie, and she was too dumb and too stoned to count. I couldn’t go to the police and say
I
was the one she’d been to meet and that we’d had a row—they might have wanted to look into things further … you know how one thing leads to another. I just couldn’t afford that kind of scandal at this point in my career. You can imagine how they would have reacted at the studio—
Chelsea’s Game
would have been finished. What advertiser stays with a show where the star is involved in such a scandal? I could imagine the headlines—‘Sex, Drugs, Money—Suicide?’ Maybe they’d even think I did it—killed her, I mean. People speculated on whether she’d done it on purpose, whether it was really an accident. Anyhow,” he added wearily, “it seemed to blow over … last week’s scandal, y’know. And then Stan Reubin called.…”

Bill Kaufmann stiffened, feeling McBain’s eyes on him.

“Jenny had spilled it all to Stan and Bill Kaufmann the week before, the whole story about the money. She’d asked them, as friends, to help her, but apparently they told her there wasn’t anything they could do. She’d called Stan again that night just before she left, to tell him she was meeting me at the beach house to have it out with me. I guess Stan wasn’t too thrilled at being woken by an ex-client at one in the morning, but he advised Jenny to tell me that if I gave back all the money I’d stolen—
stolen
, Bob; goddamn, I
earned
it—then she wouldn’t prosecute, and she’d forget about the money lost on the bad investments.

“They came to see me, Bob, the pair of them. They caught me at the end of work when I was real tired and the day’s coke high had worn off. Bill was all smiles, said he understood my position as an up-and-coming actor and that Jenny was a difficult woman. Stan was smooth and legal, ‘protecting my interests,’ he said … all I had to do was tell him everything that’d happened and
he’d know how to protect me. So I told him. And then the scene changed.… Jesus, Bob, those two bastards
threatened
me! Stan said I could be indicted for fraud and grand theft.” Rory choked on the words. “Even if I got off it would ruin my career.
If
they went to the police. Then they changed their attitude, said they’d be willing to forget they’d ever heard anything if we could come to some satisfactory agreement. And that’s why Stan Reubin became my lawyer and Bill Kaufmann my agent—at higher percentages than any others in the business. And I do what they say—Rory Grant jumps when they say jump!”

Fitz switched off the machine and slid the ejected tape into his pocket.

Bill’s frightened eyes met Fitz’s calm blue ones.

“What’re you going to do about it?” he demanded hoarsely. “You can’t prove anything. Anyway, I didn’t do anything wrong. Rory was just overwrought, he was disturbed about Jenny’s death. Stan and I just took him in hand to protect him from himself … he’s a cokehead, y’know, nobody’ll believe him.”

“
I
believe him.” Fitz controlled the contempt and anger he felt as he watched Kaufmann squirm. “I believe that you and Reubin contributed to Jenny Haven’s death drive down Malibu Canyon just as Rory Grant did. And what you did to Rory was as close to blackmail as you can get.”