Night Night, Sleep Tight (4 page)

Chapter 5

T
he story had made national news—
DAUGHTER KILLS STAR’S BOYF
R
I
E
N
D
.

It had happened on a night when Deirdre was sleeping over at the Nichols’ house, late after one of Bunny Nichol’s lavish parties. Bunny’s boyfriend, Antonio “Tito” Acevedo, was stabbed to death in her bedroom.

Deirdre didn’t find out about the murder for days after because she was in the hospital. Her father—he and Gloria had been among the guests at the party earlier—had come back in the middle of the night to take her home. He’d carried her, half-asleep, out to his car. On the way home, his car skidded off the road and she was thrown out.

She’d spent weeks in Northridge Hospital—Arthur had insisted the ambulance take her there because of their excellent reputation rehabbing Vietnam vets. After multiple operations, skin grafts, and physical therapy, the doctors finally conceded that the damage to her femoral nerve was permanent. She’d never be able to move her hip or bend and straighten her leg. She’d never feel heat, or cold, or pain, or even a gentle touch on the front of her thigh. Over time, the muscles would atrophy.

No one had warned her how much she’d come to cherish what she’d once been—unremarkable and nearly invisible. Instead, her mere presence would attract uneasy stares.

Desperate for anything to distract her from the pain and uncertainty of her ordeal, Deirdre had found a newspaper someone had left in the hospital visitors’ lounge and read about the murder. After that she watched the nightly news, first from her hospital bed and later from the living room couch, as the story of the murder, photographs of the crime scene, and the lives of Bunny and Joelen Nichol and Tito Acevedo were endlessly dissected and fed to an audience ravenous for every sordid detail. Later, when Deirdre was strong enough to visit the public library, she surreptitiously tore news articles from the public copies of the
L.A. Times
and stole away with them so she could read and reread their accounts of the murder and inquest that followed.

The cause of death was a single knife thrust to the solar plexus; apparently Tito had dropped like a stone. “I did it,” Joelen had told the police, who must have arrived at the house after Arthur drove off with Deirdre.

At the hearing, the coroner made a big deal about the lack of defensive wounds. Why hadn’t he tried to protect himself? But that didn’t seem at all far-fetched to Deirdre. Tito Acevedo, who carried a roll of hundred-dollar bills and a silver monogrammed gun-shaped Zippo lighter in his trouser pocket, would never have seen it coming. He wouldn’t have been the slightest bit afraid when Joelen came at him, all of fifteen years old, a hundred pounds, dressed in that flowered cotton granny gown she wore whenever Deirdre slept over.

“He ran into my knife,” Joelen told the coroner’s jury.

That ten-inch kitchen knife was scrutinized, as was the nightgown Joelen had been wearing. An expert who testified was skeptical. Why wasn’t there more blood? he wanted to know. From the wound Tito suffered, there should have been more.

But far more compelling than the presence or absence of blood evidence or defensive wounds was the dramatic testimony of Joelen’s tearful movie star mother. Bunny Nichol sat in the witness box wearing a dark suit and a blouse with a ruffled collar that swathed her neck like a bandage. Her jet-black hair was pulled back in a severe French twist. In the black-and-white television images, there were bruises under her eye and over her jaw, livid against skin that was otherwise flawless as bone china. She answered each question posed to her in a calm, quiet voice. It had been odd to see Sy Sterling, whom Deirdre had known forever as her father’s best friend, performing his courtroom role on TV, a scaled-down Perry Mason.

“Why did you stay with a man who beat you?” Sy had asked, just a trace of his Russian accent surfacing:
bitt you
.

“I was afraid,” Bunny said, staring down and kneading her hands together. “I had to do anything and everything he wanted or he said he’d ruin my face. He said I’d be sorry if I ever tried to leave him. He said if I told anyone, he’d get me where it hurt most. I knew what he meant.” She’d paused and her audience, including Deirdre, had leaned into the silence. “My daughter. He would have killed us both.”

Deirdre had heard Bunny and Tito fighting some nights when she’d slept over. Angry shouting matches. Breaking glass. She could easily imagine herself in Joelen’s place, listening to Tito’s escalating threats and growing more and more terrified. Formulating a plan. Creeping downstairs to the kitchen. Pulling open a drawer and selecting the longest, sharpest, pointiest knife she could find. As she climbed the stairs, had Joelen thought about what would happen after? Did she hesitate as she approached the closed bedroom door? Did she have second thoughts as she stood in the hallway, screwing up her courage? Something must have spurred her to act at the moment that she did. Maybe it had been the sound of furniture breaking. Or a fist slammed into a wall. Or Bunny crying out.

It hadn’t taken the coroner’s jury long. After a few hours they ruled. Justifiable homicide. It wasn’t
not guilty,
but it wasn’t
guilty,
either. The verdict kept Joelen from being indicted for murder.

A real “David slays Goliath tale” was the verdict rendered by the TV newscaster Deirdre watched, lying on the living room sofa recovering from her first operation. She tried to call Joelen after the hearing but no one answered. She wrote to her but got no response. She begged her parents to drive her over there but they said there was no point to that. Bunny had left town. It was as if Deirdre’s friend had vanished into thin air.

For months after, Bunny Nichol kept an uncharacteristically low profile too. Then came the news that she was back in town and married to a handsome young TV soap opera star, Derek Hutchinson. A few months later, the papers ran a photograph of the happy couple with a baby. Reporters were a tad more discreet in those days: Deirdre didn’t remember the press commenting on the obvious fact that Bunny Nichol had been pregnant when she’d had her final fight with Antonio Acevedo. Pregnant when she testified on nationwide TV. No one was surprised that the baby boy, with his head of dark hair, olive skin, and dark eyes, resembled Antonio Acevedo a whole lot more than he resembled Derek Hutchinson, who was slender and fair. But those rumors were a gentle breeze compared to the shit storm that got kicked up a few years later when Derek Hutchinson died of AIDS, one of the sad first wave that took out so many of Hollywood’s most talented.

Deirdre was finally well enough to return to school near the end of the academic year. At least she walked back into class on crutches, not in a wheelchair. Even the high and mighty Marianne Wasserman was friendly and solicitous, organizing a posse of her friends to carry Deirdre’s books between classes. It made Deirdre queasy now, remembering the small amount of celebrity status she’d found herself basking in simply because she’d been Joelen’s friend. Even as she’d traded on her friendship with Joelen, it had occurred to her how toxic notoriety could be.

Chapter 6

I
n the late afternoon, the pool was still cordoned off. Officers were searching the bushes surrounding the yard. Again. They’d taken samples of pool water and collected Arthur’s discarded towel and clothing, the pool’s leaf skimmer, and the tumbler that had been on the patio table.

It seemed awfully thorough for an accident investigation, so Deirdre wasn’t surprised by the arrival of a man in a suit who climbed over the crime scene tape and talked with a few of the officers, including the one who’d questioned Deirdre and Henry. The newcomer crouched and looked under the tent that covered Arthur’s body. After a pair of attendants zipped Arthur into a dark blue L.A. County Coroner’s body bag, the man stood and approached the house.

He beckoned to Deirdre through the glass, and she slid the door open. “Miss Unger? I’m Detective Sergeant Robert Martinez.” He showed her his badge and gazed at her from under dark eyebrows. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Henry came up behind her. “Detective?”

“Detective Sergeant Robert Martinez, sir.” The detective’s gaze shifted from Deirdre to Henry. His skin was dark, with the leathery texture of an aging surfer.

“Do they always send a detective out?” Henry said. “This was an accident.”

“Unaccompanied death. It’s not unusual. Mind if I come in the house? I have a few—”

“We’ll come out,” Henry said, nudging Deirdre out in front of him. He followed and slid the door firmly shut.

“Mr. Unger was a strong swimmer?” Martinez asked when they were settled at the table on the patio.

“He swam every day,” Henry said. “Like clockwork. Thirty laps.”

“He often swim late at night?”

“Sometimes.”

Martinez shot Deirdre a questioning look.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Henry would know better than me. I don’t live here.”

“When did you last see your father?”

“In person?” Deirdre tried to remember the last time she’d been there.

“You came up for his birthday, remember?” Henry said. “January.”

“Right,” Deirdre said. That had been months ago.

“And the last time you talked to him?” Detective Martinez asked.

“Last week. He asked me to come up and help him.”

“Help him what?”

“Get the house ready to go on the market.”

Martinez’s eyebrows rose a notch. Deirdre followed his gaze up to the sagging awning over the patio, across the paving stones with their cracked cement riven with weeds, and over to the peeling paint on the frame around the sliding doors. “Was anyone with you last night?” he asked her.

“No,” Deirdre said.

“Anyone see you leave your house this morning?”

“No, I don’t think so. I—”

“Oh, Christ,” Henry said. “You can’t think—”

“What about you, sir?”

Henry’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Last night? I was here. This morning? Asleep until a few hours ago. And no, no one was with me. Just my dogs.”

“And when did you see your father last?”

“Last night.” Henry blinked. “No. Yesterday morning. Before I left for work. I didn’t get back until late. After midnight. I went straight to bed. I just assumed . . . Oh my God. You don’t think he’s been out there all night?”

Martinez gazed impassively back at Henry. “We’ll know more when the coroner has finished examining him. Yesterday morning, when you last saw your father, how did he seem?”

“He seemed fine,” Henry said. “Normal. He was griping, you know. He liked to complain. And he was hungover.”

“Your father was a drinker?”

“He liked a few drinks at night. And he could get maudlin.”

“Maudlin?”

“Not wallowing in self-pity or anything. Just kvetching. Short stick. Half-empty glass. But it wasn’t like he was about to kill himself.”

Suicide? Deirdre hadn’t even considered it. After the way her father had already screwed up her life, she couldn’t believe he’d arrange for her to be the one to find him. But if it wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t an accident . . . “What are you suggesting?” Deirdre asked.

“What we know for sure is that your father died most likely sometime last night. It’s not clear how it happened, or even where it happened. We don’t know for certain that he drowned. But if he was upset—”

“I told you, he wasn’t upset,” Henry said.

“I’m sorry. I know this is painful.”

“He was not upset,” Henry said, his voice cold and emphatic.

“Was your father seeing someone?” The detective directed the question at Deirdre.

“I have no idea. Was he?” Deirdre asked Henry. Arthur rarely talked to her about his lady friends and for that she was grateful.

Henry rolled his eyes. “No. He was not seeing anyone.”

“You sound sure of that.”

“I live here. I knew when he was seeing someone.”

“He was divorced?”

“A long time ago,” Deirdre said.

“They get along?” Martinez asked.

“At a distance,” Henry said.

“It couldn’t have been her,” Deirdre said. “She’s on a retreat.”

“Huh.” Martinez started to get up, then paused. “Just one more thing. You say it wasn’t unusual for your father to swim late at night. It seems odd that he didn’t turn on the lights in the pool.”

“Lights?” Henry asked.

“There are no outside lights on now,” Martinez said. “Maybe you turned them off when you got here?” he asked Deirdre.

“I . . .” Had she? She’d been in such a state. Then she realized she couldn’t have. “No. The light switch is inside and I couldn’t get in.”

“What about you?” Martinez asked Henry. “Last night when you got home? Or maybe this morning?”

“Maybe.” Henry thought for a moment. “No. I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Hmm. Maybe the lights are on a timer and they went off automatically?”

“No,” Henry said.

“And the lights are working?” When Henry shrugged, Martinez added, “Can you check?”

Henry slid open the glass doors and reached for the light switch just inside.

“Hang on.” Martinez crossed the yard and stood inside the fence to the pool. “Okay, give it a try.”

The lights on the patio wall above Deirdre’s head came on. The light in the pool must have come on, too, because Martinez flashed a thumbs-up and called out, “Thanks.”

Martinez stared out at the water, one arm across his chest, the other propping up his chin. Deirdre knew what he was mulling. Would Arthur take a nighttime swim without turning on any lights? And if he had turned them on, then who turned them off? Because by the end of his swim, he’d have been incapable of doing so.

Chapter 7

T
hat’s it for now,” Detective Martinez said. “The investigators should be done soon. Mind if I take a quick look around inside?”

It was the second time he’d invited himself into the house. “Inside?” Deirdre said.

“Just to be thorough. Then we won’t have to come back.”

Henry edged Deirdre aside. “No way, José.”

Deirdre cringed but Martinez barely raised an eyebrow. “Okay, then. We’ll be leaving soon, but we’re not done. Your father’s remains should be ready to be collected tomorrow or the next day. You should line up a mortuary. They’ll know how to proceed. And here.” He took out a business card and gave it to Deirdre. “In case either of you needs to reach me. If you think of something.” He offered a second card to Henry, who stared at it for a moment. “Or find something you think we should know about,” Martinez added.

Henry took the card.

L
ater that night, Deirdre was curled up on the couch, Henry sprawled in Arthur’s favorite chair, a leather recliner. The wind had picked up, and the occasional gust set roof tiles chattering. Deirdre put the nub of a nearly smoked-out joint between her lips, inhaled, held her breath, and handed the joint back to Henry. They’d been eating from boxes of Chinese takeout that Henry charged to Arthur’s credit card.

Deirdre had called Westwood Memorial Park. Darryl Zanuck was buried there, along with Natalie Wood. The undertaker Deirdre talked to on the phone had a deep, resonant voice that reminded her of Orson Welles. Of course, he said, they’d care for Arthur’s
remains
. The term seemed appropriate. What she and Henry had pulled from the pool had barely been their father. By the time the coroner and the mortuary got done with him, he’d have been examined and dissected, his fluids drained away, his hubris along with his wit and warmth. People would come to the service and say what a swell guy Arthur Unger was. As he’d once remarked of a particularly foul-tempered studio executive,
You never look as good as you do at your own funeral
.

“At least Pedro didn’t say don’t skip town,” Henry said, taking a pull on the joint.

“The detective’s name is Robert,” Deirdre replied, releasing her breath. “And maybe that’s just something they say in the movies.” Deirdre had no intention of leaving town. She’d called Stefan and left a message saying that it might be days before she got back. He’d be on his own with the new show—hard to believe she’d installed it just twenty-four hours ago. “So I guess you didn’t want him snooping around inside the house,” she added.

Henry started to laugh, choking on a final drag. He sputtered as he stubbed out the butt. “No way. Not with this shit in the house. You can bet he won’t find a trace of illicit substances when he comes back.”

“
When
he comes back?”

“Oh, he’ll be back. You bought that crap about how they send out a detective whenever there’s an unaccompanied death?” Henry scowled, making a face like the petulant thirteen-year-old he’d once been.

“Poor baby. Pushed your buttons, didn’t he? What’s the matter, you don’t like cops?”

Henry threw a pillow at her. She caught it and sank back into the couch and let her gaze wander around the room. Arthur was everywhere, from the stack of
Variety
and
Life
magazines to ashtrays that still overflowed with the remains of her father’s Marlboros to a glass cart with an ice bucket and a half-empty bottle of Dewar’s. She hauled herself to her feet and, unsteady without her crutch, limped over to the piano. Open on the music stand was “Rhapsody in Blue.” Shelved nearby was her father’s cherished collection of LPs.

She edged over to the turntable. The record on top was
Ella and Louis.
She started the machine and set the needle. Closed her eyes to listen to the piano introduction, then Armstrong’s easy, bluesy voice, having
that feeling of self-pity . . .

“We should be drinking Dad’s scotch,” Deirdre said, turning back to Henry.

“Help yourself.”

“I didn’t say I wanted any. I’m not crazy about the stuff.” Besides, on top of pot, hard liquor would be a very bad idea. “But it was his drink. And this is his music.”

Henry stood and offered her his hand. He lifted her off the ground, set her feet on top of his, and rocked back and forth to the music. Deirdre closed her eyes and sang along. “
A foggy day . . .”
The words were muffled in Henry’s shoulder, his shirt damp with her tears. “He taught me to waltz. And the Lindy,” she said.

“You were a good dancer, Deeds. All he taught me to do was smoke. And drink. And drive too fast.”

“Mmm, driving too fast. I can blame him for that, too.”

Henry helped Deirdre back to the couch and then sat down again himself. He poked his chopsticks into the take-out box and took another mouthful. A Singapore noodle stuck to his chin. Deirdre imagined what he’d look like as a Chia pet with noodles instead of grass growing out of his head and started to laugh.

Henry reached across, tweezed a spear of broccoli from her take-out box, and popped it into his mouth. Brown sauce dribbled down his chin to meet the noodle.

The room started to spin. Deirdre closed her eyes, which only made her feel worse. She lurched back upright.

When the phone rang, neither Deidre nor Henry moved to answer it. The machine picked up after four rings, and their father’s voice echoed into the room. “You’ve reached Arthur Unger . . .” Deirdre flopped over and pulled a cushion over her head. When she heard the beep, she lifted the cushion.

“Hello? Henry, Deirdre? Are you there?”
Hyello.
Deirdre recognized the slightly accented voice before he added, “It is Sy.” Sy Sterling, attorney to the stars, was the closest thing Deirdre and Henry had to an uncle from the old country. “I heard the news. I cannot believe this is happening. I talked to your father just the other day. Yesterday, for Chrissake. And”—he paused; his voice turned raspy and his accent thickened—“we were saying how we had to get together. Pick up some corned beef sandwiches and go to the track.”

Henry lurched from the chair, dropping the box of noodles, which exploded onto the Oriental rug. He cursed, then tripped on the rug’s raveled edge halfway to the phone and cursed again. In seconds, Bear and Baby had Hoovered up the spill.

“One of you call me back as soon as you can? I am in my car right now but I will be home later. Two seven six—”

Henry finally grabbed the phone. “Sy? It’s Henry.” Henry sounded winded. “Thanks for calling. Yeah.” He paused, nodding his head a little. “I don’t know. He was in the pool when Deirdre got here this morning. The cops were here most of the day. They think he died last night.” Henry listened. “Are we okay?” He looked across at Deirdre. “I guess.” He listened some more. “Of course I didn’t let them into the house.”

Henry turned his back to Deirdre and walked toward the window. The phone cord stretched from coiled to straight until it wouldn’t stretch farther. Henry stood quietly, listening, a long silence with just the occasional “Uh-huh,” “Sure,” “Okay.”

Deirdre got up again. She limped over to the wall of bookshelves and picked up a framed photograph of all four of them, scrubbed and polished and posed against a backlit scrim of blue sky and palm trees. Ten-year-old Deirdre wore a demure black velvet dress with a white lacy collar, her hair skinned back in a ponytail. Henry, a year older, looked downright military in his little suit. What you couldn’t see was that he’d been wearing flip-flops. That year he’d refused to wear real shoes.

Alongside the family portrait was a framed black-and-white photograph of eight-year-old Deirdre in a sparkly leotard and skirt of layered ruffles. Deirdre knew the ruffles were pink, and the black patent leather tap shoes had been bought a size too big for her so that she could “grow into them.” More girls in similar getups stood posed behind her looking supremely bored as Deirdre danced her solo.

She turned the picture facedown on the shelf.

Behind the pictures were videocassettes, each with a handwritten label—some her mother’s careful printing, others her father’s scrawl. Also lined up was a row of their leather-bound movie scripts, the titles embossed in gold on the spines. Deirdre ran her hand over the leather. Gloria had let Arthur keep all their scripts when she’d walked out. She’d left behind most of her clothes and jewelry, too, along with her perfume and cosmetics. She’d probably have shed her skin and left that behind if she could have.

The shelved scripts were in chronological order. There was
Lady,
Be Good,
their first movie, a remake of a 1920s silent film of the Gershwin musical comedy that was long on jazzy score, glittery costumes, and dance numbers and short on plot. Next to it,
A Night in St. Tropez
. Deirdre opened that script and paged through hand-typed pages until she got to one of the nine-by-eleven, black-and-white glossies that were bound into the book. Carmen Miranda winked at the camera, wearing ropes of pearls and a skirt that looked like it was made of bananas.

At the end of the row were two copies of
Singing All the Way Home,
the last script her parents wrote together, and one of the last romantic musicals in an era that had been full of them.

“Really?” Henry was saying into the phone. “All right then!” Deirdre looked over at him. He was smiling. Some good news?

Deirdre pulled one of the copies of
Singing All the Way Home
off the shelf and opened it. There were no pages bound into it. Instead, tucked inside was a pocket folder that held a sheaf of papers—an unbound manuscript, carbon copies on onionskin paper. Centered on an otherwise blank first page were the words “WORKING TITLE: ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER,” and below that, “by Arthur Unger, 1985.”

Deirdre turned to the next page and read.

CHAPTER 1: EXIT LAUGHING

The writing was on the wall of our office at Twentieth Century Fox when the secretary didn’t show up and the phones disappeared. We were screwed. Shafted. Sucker-punched. Time to strike the set.

Deirdre smiled. She could hear her father’s voice. For a moment her chest tightened and her vision blurred.

Beneath the opening paragraph, text was formatted like the slug lines and stage directions of a movie script.

INT. TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX - SCREENWRITERS OFFICE - DAY (1963)

ARTHUR UNGER opens the door to his office and starts to enter. He’s trim, middle-aged, wears a suit and holds his hat. Stops. He looks surprised. Dismayed.

His secretary’s desk is empty. Disconnected phone wires are coiled on the floor.

ARTHUR crosses to the window, looks two stories down to a deserted studio street where a huge movie poster for Cleopatra is plastered across a wall. In front of it is an empty phone booth.

ARTHUR raises the window. Sits on the ledge.

No, I didn’t jump. Two stories up? Not high enough to kill me, and damned if I was going to let the sons of bitches cripple me for life. When I went outside to use the pay phone, I swear there were vultures circling overhead. Could’ve been a scene out of Hitchcock, but Hitchcock worked for Universal.

Turned out hundreds of us arrived on the Fox lot that morning to find our office phone lines disconnected and our typewriters returned to Props.

It was a clever device for a screenwriter’s memoir, alternating between the idiosyncratic formatting of a screenplay and straight narrative. Odd that Arthur had kept this carbon copy tucked in the cover of a movie script. Almost like he’d hidden it there.

As Deirdre flipped to the last chapter to see how far Arthur gotten, Henry’s voice pulled her off the page. “All right. Uh-huh. Sure. Don’t worry, I won’t forget.” Clearly, he was winding up the call. Deirdre put the empty script cover back on the shelf and carried the folder with the manuscript pages to her bedroom, where she slipped it into the drawer in her bedside table.

When she returned, Henry had hung up the phone. Deirdre said, “Was that Sy?”

“
Sí,
” Henry said, deadpan.

“So?” Even if it was a wildly inappropriate time to be cracking jokes, Arthur would have appreciated the old comedy routine that he’d reprise himself whenever the opportunity presented itself. It was one of the perks, he used to say, of having a friend named Sy.

“He’s coming over tomorrow morning to talk about Dad’s will.”

“What won’t you forget?”

“Huh?”

“You told him you wouldn’t forget something.”

“When the police come back to search the house, there shouldn’t be anything here we don’t want them to find.” Henry went into the kitchen and came back out with a large black plastic garbage bag, into which he dumped the contents of the ashtray.

“That’s a big bag for a few ashes,” Deirdre said.

“There’s more. Things Dad would want me to get rid of.”

“What things?”

Henry’s answer was cut off by the phone ringing again. Both Deirdre and Henry froze, waiting for the answering machine to kick in. After the beep, this time they heard a woman’s voice: “Hey, Zelda? You there? It’s Thalia.”

Deirdre might not have recognized Joelen’s voice, but she definitely recognized those nicknames. Zelda, the smart but painfully plain and geeky character who lusted after television’s Dobie Gillis, was code for Deirdre; Thalia, the gorgeous, moneygrubbing blonde whom Dobie lusted after, was Joelen.

Deirdre reached for the phone but Henry stopped her as Joelen’s voice continued. “Sy called and told us what happened. Gosh, I don’t know where to begin. I just hate saying this to a machine.” A pause. “I’m so sorry. I really can’t believe it.” There was a longer pause, then: “Listen, I don’t know how long you’ll be in town, and I know it’s been ages since we were friends. But we were. Really good friends. If there’s anything I can do to help, all you have to do is name it. You know where I am. Same place. Call me
.
” Joelen recited the number. Deirdre still knew it by heart. “Mom sends condolences.”