Night Night, Sleep Tight (16 page)

Chapter 29

S
y returned to the wing chair and sank into it, his face receding into shadows. He closed his eyes for a moment and tented his fingers over his belt buckle. Then his eyes opened and he glanced across at Gloria, who was still standing behind Deirdre with her arms around her. Some kind of message seemed to pass between them.

“All right,” Sy said. “Well then. I was hoping it would never come to this, but here we are and so it is. As you know, I have for a very long time been Elenor Nichol’s personal attorney. I am also her friend. She called me that night. Very late. She called and asked me”—he gave a tired smile and shook his head—“make that
commanded
me to come over right away. She said something terrible had happened to Tito.

“I told her to call an ambulance. She said it was too late for that. She needed me to be there when she called the police. So of course I dressed and went right over. As I was driving up the driveway to the house, I passed a car pulling out. It was dark, and I could not see who was driving. But it was a sports car with the top down. Naturally I assumed it was your father. And when I learned what had happened, and that you had been in the house, I further assumed that he had come to get you out of there before all hell broke loose. That is what I thought until just now when you showed me the accident report. I still find it difficult to believe that you were driving that car.”

“The dress? The knife? Why did my father have them?”

“I’m afraid that is something I do not know. This is what I do know. When I got there, Bunny took me up to her bedroom. Tito was on the floor. Dead, of course. Bunny said they had had a terrible fight. Worse than usual. Trying to placate him, she had told him that she was pregnant. She thought that would make him happy. Instead, he exploded. Punched her in the stomach. Tried to choke her. Tito knew it could not be his child. He was sterile.”

“Elenor Nichol killed Tito?” Deirdre asked.

“That is what she told me. And right away I thought, ‘self-defense.’ I did not doubt it for a moment, and I am sure I could have persuaded a jury. Police had been called to the house before. Newspapers had printed photographs of them fighting in a nightclub. On top of that, Antonio Acevedo had a long, well-documented history of violence. If Bunny had been charged, I would have tried to make the jury aware of the rumors that he had his last girlfriend disposed of. Elenor Nichol would have come across as a sympathetic victim. Desperate. And—”

Gloria said, “And an accomplished actress.” The bitterness in her tone took Deirdre aback.

“Of course she is,” Sy said. “But this did not seem like an act. She was agitated. In acute distress, emotionally and physically. Her neck was red and her vocal cords were so badly bruised that she could barely speak.”

A chill ran down Deirdre’s back. Why on earth had she and Joelen been allowed to hang out all those long afternoons with just Tito in the house?

“I placed the call to the police,” Sy went on. “While we waited for them to get there, I prepared Bunny for the questions they would ask. I told her that I had seen your father’s car pulling out when I arrived. She said she had called Arthur to come get you. That you had been sound asleep and knew nothing about what happened. We agreed, the police didn’t need to know that you’d been there.

“The police came. Examined the body. They were about to start questioning Bunny when Joelen made a rather dramatic appearance. She staggered into the room, unsteady on her feet, slurring her words. Bunny told me later that she had given Joelen a sedative, but apparently it had not knocked her out. Slurred speech or not, there was no question about what she said. ‘I did not mean to kill him.’ The police took it as a confession.”

“Bunny didn’t contradict her?” Deirdre said.

Sy shook his head and pressed his lips together. “After that, things moved quickly. One of the officers read Joelen her rights. They tried to cuff her but Bunny broke down, sobbing and screaming at them to stop. After all, Joelen was just a child.

“Finally Bunny calmed down and the police let her find a coat for Joelen to put on. And that was classic Bunny—always thinking about how things would look, and she was absolutely right. Photographers were already assembled outside the house, of course, just waiting for her to come out. God knows how they knew.” Sy stood, stepped to the window, and looked out. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Very next day, first thing Bunny did was get a security gate. Too bad she had not installed it earlier.”

“What did you think?” Gloria asked. “They can’t both have killed him.”

“What I thought?
Pffft.
What difference did it make? The police heard Joelen’s confession. I did my job. I told them both to stop talking.” He gave a world-weary grimace. “That is about the best an attorney can do in a situation like that.”

“Why would Arthur have ended up with the knife that killed Tito?” Gloria asked.

Sy pondered for a moment, working his lips in and out. “We don’t know that it’s the same knife.” He turned to Deirdre. “Where is it now?”

“I threw it away.” The lie popped out without a moment’s hesitation.

“You did, did you?” Sy said. Deirdre could see the skepticism in his eyes.

“Day before yesterday. I tossed it into a neighbor’s garbage can.”

“Hmm. And what about the dress?”

“Destroyed in the fire.”

“And—” The sound of the front door opening stopped him.

“Henry?” her mother called out. To Deirdre, she said in a quiet voice, “Let’s discuss this some other time. All right?”

A moment later Henry walked into the den, his motorcycle helmet hanging from his hand. He looked from Gloria to Sy to Deirdre. “Who died now?”

“Just your father,” Gloria said. She and Sy exchanged a look, and they both eyed Deirdre.
Later.
She’d already gotten the message. “Henry, you’re back in time to help us call around and let people know about the memorial service.”

Henry looked Deirdre up and down. “Wow. So you pulled out all the stops. How’d it go at City Hall? Did you get Tyler to spill?”

Deirdre felt exhausted and drained. She took a breath. They were all watching her. “He says it was arson.”

“Arson? But that’s absurd,” Gloria said.

“The fire started in a big bag of potting mix, but it was the wrong kind. Too much nitrate, or something like that. He said you’d never have used it for growing geraniums. There were cigarette butts in it. And kerosene.”

Henry’s gaze shifted toward the garage. “So does this mean the insurance claim gets tied up?”

“It means somebody deliberately set fire to the garage,” Deirdre said.

“Henry’s right,” Sy said. “This will surely tie up any kind of settlement. The insurance company will send in an investigator, and the police will be back, too, asking the obvious question: Was the fire connected to your father’s death?”

The logic was inescapable. A death that turned out to be murder. Two days later, a fire that turned out to be arson. How could they not think there was a connection?

“What should we do?” Gloria asked.

“There’s nothing to do,” Sy said. He crossed to the television and unpaused the VCR. A jazz trumpet blared and on the screen, Fred Astaire twirled, scooped up a silver tray with demitasse cups on it, and gracefully leaped off the table without losing a cup. “Just sit tight and try to give Arthur a proper send-off.”

Chapter 30

I
t’s only a movie. It’s only a movie.
That was what Deirdre used to whisper to herself as she tried to drown out the sound of her parents arguing. She’d repeated those same words to get her through round after round of torturous physical therapy.

It’s only a movie,
she told herself now, as she made phone call after phone call, working her way through a list of Arthur’s friends and associates, telling everyone that Arthur’s memorial service had been scheduled for Wednesday, day after tomorrow.
I hope you’ll be able to make it. We’ll have sandwiches at the house after if you can drop by.
She tried not to think about when the police and insurance investigators would descend next.

Henry worked the other phone line while Gloria cleaned the house. After about an hour, Gloria put out a platter of tuna fish sandwiches and the three of them took a break to eat. Deirdre tossed her leftover crusts to the dogs and then went back to making calls.

Meanwhile, Sy went out for a case of Arthur’s favorite scotch and bags of ice. When he came back, he stood beside Deirdre and leaned close. “I noticed,” he said under his breath. “You did not seem worried about what the police might find out in the alley when they come back.” It smelled as if he’d helped himself to a nip of the liquor he’d purchased.

Deirdre had forgotten her lie, so it took her a moment to realize that he was talking about the knife. Flustered, she started to dig herself in deeper. “I took it up the alley and buried it in a bag of grass clippings.”

“Grass clippings? You’re sure about that?” When she mustered a weak response, he held up his hands. “No. It’s better that I am ignorant. But try not to forget, I am much better at sussing out lies than you are at telling them.”

Deirdre’s face grew hot. Henry, who was standing in the doorway, must have overheard that because he guffawed.

“Henry,” Sy said, “that goes for you, too.”

The smirk wiped itself off Henry’s face. Abruptly, he turned and walked away.

Sy turned back to Deirdre. “And you really do need to find that person who helped you with the exhibit Friday night in the gallery. If she verifies your account, the police will back off. If you do not . . .”

Sy’s tone shook Deirdre into action. She called Stefan at the gallery. “Did you talk to Avram?”

“I’ve tried, believe me. But . . .”

“
But?
”

“When I call the number he gave us, I get a recorded message that isn’t in English. At first I thought it was just a problem with international connections, but—”

“There has to be a way to reach him. Stefan, this is serious. His assistant is the only person who can vouch for where I was that night.”

“I get that. But listen, I think we have a problem. I tried calling some other galleries, thinking maybe one of the other dealers might know how to reach him. Not one of them has ever heard of Avram Sigismund.”

Deirdre felt like a stone sank in the pit of her stomach. “I thought you checked him out.”

“I did. His portfolio seemed solid. His sales records in Europe looked good. But it was all a sham. On top of everything else, the last check he wrote us bounced.”

“I don’t understand. Why—?”

“And you know what else? Turns out I could have stayed at the gallery that night and worked on the exhibit with you after all. That journalist I was supposed to meet? She stood me up.”

“Stood you up?” Deirdre felt numb.

“Didn’t even call to apologize. Can you believe it? I drove all the way down to Coronado, waited at the bar at the golf course for over an hour.”

It didn’t require much paranoia to wonder if someone had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that no one could vouch for Deirdre’s whereabouts that night. Then she herself had sealed the deal by picking up that shovel from the driveway and leaving her fingerprints on the shaft.

By the time Deirdre hung up the phone, her hands were sweaty. When Detective Martinez returned, she’d have to explain to him that she had no idea how to reach the person who was in the gallery with her until late Friday night. That the artist whose show Deirdre had been preparing to open could not be reached and might not, in fact, exist. That she and Stefan had been conned by cartons of smelly old shoes and the promise of payment up front.

Chapter 31

T
hat night, Deirdre had dinner with her mother and Henry at Hamburger Hamlet. Then they drove to Hollywood Boulevard for sundaes at C.C. Brown’s, where the booths were like church pews and they served mammoth scoops of ice cream in chilled tin cups with thick hot fudge and crispy whole almonds, a pitcher of extra fudge sauce on the side. Deirdre would have preferred the small, elegant sundaes served with a single amaretto cookie at Wil Wright’s, but Brown’s had been her father’s favorite and Wil Wright’s had closed.

Later, when Deirdre got in bed, she thought about how readily Sy had seen through her lies. Knew full well that she hadn’t gotten rid of the knife. She wondered if he knew that Arthur had been working on a memoir. It seemed so unlikely that Arthur would have kept that from his oldest friend and closest confidant.

Deirdre pulled the manuscript out of the drawer in her bedside table.
One Damned Thing After Another
—not only was it the perfect title for Arthur’s memoir, but it also described precisely what her life had turned into since the moment she’d agreed to help him get his house ready to go on the market. She paged through the beginning, skimming past what she’d already read. In the next section, Arthur wrote about arriving in Hollywood and rapidly blowing through his savings. Broke, he’d holed up on a friend’s couch. Crashed some cocktail parties. Made connections and bullshitted his way into some low-level jobs, working with other talented newcomers. Met and fallen in love with a chorus girl. Born Gertrude Wolkind, she’d changed her name to Gloria Walker. The truth was, she was a whole lot smarter than she was sprightly, and soon she’d quit dancing and started to work with Arthur.
Helping
him write
was how Arthur saw it.

From the moment Arthur started collaborating with Gloria, his luck changed. Deirdre had intended to skim the pages—after all, she’d heard most of the stories many times over. But she found herself caught up in her father’s storytelling.

In one chapter he told how he and Gloria talked their way into getting assigned their first movie script. Gloria stole a copy of the Academy Award–winning screenplay for
Casablanca
from the studio library and they cribbed shamelessly from it for story structure and formatting. When their script passed muster, they had their first movie credit and their career took off.

From there on, Arthur’s memoir read like a movie with Hollywood’s greats in supporting roles and a bit player holding the camera. In one scene Spyros Skouras, the head of Fox, rose from his breakfast in a rage, jowls quivering, spewing incomprehensible English and crumbs of half-chewed toast at Arthur. A few chapters later, Arthur was in the dressing room with a half-dressed Marilyn Monroe, resisting her advances while coaxing her into costume and out onto the soundstage to deliver a knockout performance of “Heatwave.” He claimed to have held Marilyn’s hand and offered this advice:

Keep trying. Hold on, baby. And always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don’t, who will? Head up, chin high. Most of all keep smiling, because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.

Could that have been Arthur? Sensitive, supportive? It sounded more like lines he’d written. Or was Deirdre’s view of her father tainted, warped by the angry adolescent girl she still had snarking away inside her?

As she read on, what came across was how much her father adored everything about the movie business. And despite the prism through which Arthur saw the past—selective memory colored by an oversized ego—it was clear that he and Gloria were much in demand in those heady early years when they churned out hit after hit.

Every so often, Arthur would mention Deirdre or Henry, and when he did it was with blind affection and pure delight. In the bitterness that had built up over the last twenty-plus years, Deirdre had forgotten how unabashedly gaga he’d been about his kids. Forgotten the many times he’d taken her to the studio to show her around but also to show her off. First they’d have lunch, sitting at a corner table in the cavernous studio commissary, surrounded by actors and actresses in full makeup and extraordinary getups. Then they’d walk over to one of the vast soundstages where invariably a movie was being shot. Deirdre had to be careful not to trip on the cables that crisscrossed the floor, and she got goose bumps remembering how absolutely still and silent she had to be the moment a voice boomed, “Quiet on set!” The painted backdrops that looked so phony in person were somehow rendered utterly believable through the magic of filming.

She was near the end of the manuscript, tired and ready to turn out the light when she read these words:
There are parties and there are parties, but the shindigs at Elenor Nichol’s house were legendary. Why did it have to be that night of all nights that our attorney finagled an invite there for us to mingle with the crème de la crème of Hollywood’s most glamorous?

A chill passed through Deirdre as she read on.

The setting was out of a movie script. Liveried attendants valet-parked the Jaguars and Mercedes that pulled up at the end of the driveway. Gloria and I got out of my six-year-old Austin-Healey feeling like pikers. We waited for a golf cart to ferry us up to the house.

Tuxedoed waiters, most of them out-of-work actors, glided about with silver trays bearing champagne flutes of Dom Pérignon and shots of Chivas and Glenlivet. The crowd included stars and studio executives, a heady mix of staggering beauty—men and women both—and arrogant power. The men swaggered about, bravado masquerading as brains. Oscar Levant seemed permanently ensconced at the piano, completely brilliant and completely soused, per usual. Needless to say, writers like Gloria and me, a dime a dozen in Hollywood, were in short supply. Most of the folks there were under the illusion that actors and directors made up lines as they went along, so who needed writers, anyway?

Bunny, as Elenor Nichol was known, though there was nothing remotely soft or cuddly about her, reigned over all. Queen of wanton amorous fire, that night she wore a crimson dress with a plunging neckline and ropes of pearls that couldn’t hold a candle to the luminescence of her skin. With her swelling bosom and round bottom, her sultry voice somewhere between a purr and a snarl, she had every man in that house salivating, including
yours truly. But no one dared to make a pass at her—not with Tito Acev
edo watching her every move like a dyspeptic guard dog.

Thug. Bully. Gigolo. Goon. Those were just a few of the labels hung on Tito—never to his face, of course. Supposedly he used to be errand boy for Mafia boss “Sam the Cigar” Giancana in Vegas before shifting his base of operations to Hollywood. Here, rumor had it, he threatened to castrate the director of Bunny’s last film when he got what Tito deemed a bit too chummy. On top of that, he fancied himself a player and took meetings, reading scripts and throwing around wads of cash. A crass charmer, he’d have made a great character in a B-movie. In real life, he was a black hole of pure nastiness. Everyone gave him a wide berth.

That night, Tito glowered silently from the shadows beside a massive potted palm in the corner of Bunny’s palatial living room. He was doing a second-rate Humphrey Bogart imitation, his eyes half-closed, pinching the end of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger behind a cupped hand.

Like the cigarette he was smoking, it turned out Tito Acevedo was on a slow burn.

Deirdre paged ahead, looking for but failing to find any mention of her or Joelen at the party. Like Oscar Levant, Arthur would have been plenty “soused” himself with all that high-class booze floating around, more than a few rungs up from his usual Dewar’s. Finally she found her own name.

Gloria and I had long ago bailed and were home sleeping it off when the phone rang. I was thinking, Christ almighty, who calls at two in the morning? I almost didn’t pick up. But then I did.

“Arthur? It’s Bunny.” Her voice didn’t sound soft or sultry—more midway between outraged and petrified. “Get Deirdre.”

Get Deirdre? For a crazy moment I was thinking: great title. Then I realized my daughter was sleeping over at Bunny’s house. I’d seen her at the party, she and Bunny’s daughter all dressed up and parading around like grown-ups.

I sat bolt upright, wide awake. “What’s wrong?”

“Something’s happened,” she said.

“To Deirdre? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. But you’ve got to get her away from here before they come.” Before I could ask who “they” were, she hung up. Talk about your cliffhanger ending.

I slapped some water on my face, threw on some clothes, and drove over there as fast as I could. Up Bunny’s long driveway to the big white house that had been lit up like a stage set hours earlier but now had just a single light on in an upstairs window.

Before I could knock, Bunny pulled open the front door. It was dark, but I could see she looked pale, her face puffy and teary-eyed. She had a nasty bruise under one eye and her lip was split. She wore a flowing peignoir that, it only occurred to me later, looked like a leftover costume from her movie
Black Lace
.

I followed her up the stairs into what I realized right away was her daughter’s bedroom. Pink walls. Twin beds. One of the beds was empty. Lying facedown on the other was Tito Acevedo.

I could smell the blood that had soaked into the quilt under Tito. The soundtrack, high-pitched squeals, turned out to be a pair of thoroughly spooked guinea pigs. Bunny’s daughter, Joelen, was huddled in a corner by their cage. She was hugging a pillow and leaning against the wall. Her eyes were shut tight. At first I thought she was asleep.

I looked around for Deirdre. Thank God she wasn’t there.

When I reached for Tito’s wrist to feel for a pulse, Bunny stopped me. “He’s dead, for Chrissake. Can’t you see that? Help me move him.” Imperious as ever.

Deirdre read on. Her father had helped Bunny wrap Tito in the quilt. They’d pulled him off the bed and dragged him down the hall to the master bedroom, where they’d rolled him over onto the floor. That must have been where the news photographers later snapped pictures of what was supposedly the crime scene. Deirdre clearly remembered a shot of a cop sitting at the edge of Bunny’s satin-covered bed, staring down at the dead man.

What happened? Who killed him? When I asked Bunny Nichol, she showed me a knife. “Recognize this?” she wanted to know.

Of course I recognized it. The last time I’d seen it was in a drawer in the buffet in my own dining room. It had been a wedding present. So what was it doing here?

I was desperate to take the knife from her. At the same time, I was afraid to touch it. The thought of how it had been used made me sick to my stomach. I know I’ve seen too many cop shows, but I was worried about leaving my fingerprints on top of those of the killer. At the same time, I realized it was too late to worry about fine points like that. The arms of my jacket and my trousers were already stained with Tito’s blood.

Bunny said not to worry. She’d get rid of the quilt from her daughter’s bedroom that we’d just dragged Tito in on. And she’d “take care” of the knife. Then she showed me a dress she said my daughter had worn to the party earlier that night. It was covered in blood too. I stared at it, too stunned and frankly afraid to ask the obvious question. Bunny promised me she’d take care of the dress, too. That the police would never know.

Know what? I wanted to ask.

If I didn’t tell, she said, she wouldn’t tell, and she’d keep these items somewhere safe. She called them her “little insurance policy.”

I asked her what in God’s name she meant by that. She blew up. What happened was my fault as much as it was hers. If I’d been a better father, and so on and so on. I had no idea what she was going on about.

Finally she calmed down and said, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll forget we had this little talk.”

Even at the time it sounded like a line of dialogue from one of her movies. But then, the whole situation felt like it was out of a movie. Everything except for Tito Acevedo, who was not pretending to be dead. And my daughter, who was somewhere in the house, needing me to get her out of there.

I asked Bunny where Deirdre was. Her answer stunned me to my core: “Shouldn’t you be asking, where’s Henry?”

Deirdre felt her jaw drop. What on earth had Henry had to do with what happened that night?

Apparently Arthur had had the same reaction.

I was about to ask what my son had to do with any of this when I heard a car outside on the gravel. I looked out the window. Headlights. Taillights. Then I realized I was looking at my own car driving away.

Bunny was beside me, looking out, too. “If you want to protect our children,” she said, coming down hard on
our
, “you’ll go home and never breathe a word of this to anyone.”

I thought about that as I walked home, hoping the police wouldn’t stop me for loitering even though I was moving as fast as I could. I was praying that when I got back to the house I’d find Deirdre safe and sound, asleep in bed.

Fortunately, it was not very far. Unfortunately, my daughter was not there. Neither was Henry.

That was the end, the very last typed line. Below it were handwritten notes, scrawled at the bottom of the manuscript’s final text and on the back of the page.

Gloria New Age.
Deirdre knew what that would be about.

Talk That Talk.
Deirdre recognized the title of the movie that had been her father’s one and only attempt at directing.

Baby boy.
She had no idea what that referred to.