Sheri Cobb South (15 page)

But what did they mean? A notation near the top left-hand corner read “Ruby 12:30
.
” Was Ruby an actress to whom he’d meant to give a screen test, or had he planned to meet with a jeweler to buy gemstones for his wife? There was no way of knowing.

The middle of the paper held more promising clues. The telephone exchange “HO 7-2214” stood out clearly, as did “BR 4-1539,” this last bearing the one-word heading of “Winston.” It wasn’t much to go on, Frankie thought, but it was a start. Back at the Studio Club, she would call both numbers and see if they yielded any useful information. She tore off the top sheet, careful not to leave incriminating fingerprints on the paper beneath. She folded the sheet three times and was just about to tuck it away into her purse when an unwelcome thought occurred to her. There was only one telephone at the Studio Club, and when it wasn’t in use by one of the girls setting up auditions or job interviews, it was usually tied up by Pauline cooing suggestively to one of her admirers—a motley collection that seemed to include half the male population of California. Even if by some miracle the telephone was available, the other girls were certain to be nearby, making a private conversation all but impossible.

Her gaze drifted to the squat black telephone on the desk. Would Miss Honeycutt be able to tell if this phone was in use? Could Mitch keep her too distracted to notice? Frankie decided to chance it. She lifted the receiver from its cradle and raised it to her ear.

“Brighton four, fifteen thirty-nine,” she murmured, not daring to raise her voice.

“You’ll have to speak up, honey, I can’t hear you,” the operator’s voice crackled from the other end of the line.

“Brighton four, fifteen thirty-nine,” she repeated, a bit stronger this time.

“One moment.” There was a pause, then a click, and a woman’s voice came through the receiver.

“Dr. Winston’s office. May I help you?”

In spite of her nervousness, Frankie felt a rush of triumph. A doctor! Surely he could shed some light on Arthur Cohen’s health prior to his death. He might even know something about the herbal tea
.

“This is Frances Foster,” Frankie said, certain that the pounding of her heart could be heard all the way down the telephone line. “I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Arthur Cohen.”

“You say Mr. Cohen referred you?” asked the tinny voice on the other end of the line.

It wasn’t exactly the way Frankie would have put it, but it seemed easier than making awkward explanations. “Yes,” she said.

“Would you like to schedule an appointment?”

Frankie hated to take up a doctor’s time when she wasn’t really sick, but a scheduled visit might be the easiest way to speak to the doctor in private. “Yes, please.”

“Dr. Winston can see you tomorrow at ten-thirty, if that is convenient.”

“Tomorrow at ten-thirty will be fine, thank you.”

Frankie hung up the receiver feeling very pleased with herself. Emboldened by success, she decided to try the second number, trusting to Mitch to cover for her until she was finished.

“Hollywood seven, twenty-two fourteen,” she informed the operator, more boldly this time. She hadn’t long to wait until an answering voice came through the line, this one raspy and male.

“Eddie here. What’s up?”

The abruptness of the question robbed Frankie of her earlier confidence. “H-hello, Mr.—er, Eddie,” Frankie stammered, “I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Arthur Cohen—”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet you are,” interrupted the unknown Eddie. “Look, I didn’t get where I am today by falling for every dame with a sob story. It’s a shame what happened to your old man, but I’ve got bills to pay too, you know.”

“I—I’m afraid there must be some mistake—”

“There’s been a mistake, all right, and poor old Artie’s the one who made it. I could have told him Peg o’ My Heart wouldn’t finish higher than fifth.”

“But—but—”

“Look, Miss Lamont, I’m a reasonable man, but I can’t wait forever. You could always hock the hardware, you know. I’ll bet you could get a pretty penny for old Oscar at auction. I’ll even give you a tip: Hail Caesar in Saturday’s two-thirty.”

Frankie slammed down the telephone and pressed a shaking hand to her rib cage. This Eddie person was a gambler! So too, had Arthur Cohen been, and not a very lucky one at that. Eddie seemed to be pressing Letitia Lamont to make good on her husband’s gambling losses. But who was Oscar, and what did Eddie mean about selling him at auction? Frankie thought that sort of thing had ended with the War Between the States.

Maybe Mitch would know. Frankie folded the paper and stuffed it into her purse, then retraced her steps back down the hall to where Mitch waited. To her chagrin, he didn’t seem concerned about her long absence at all. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself hugely. He sat perched on the edge of Miss Honeycutt’s desk, while the gatekeeper of Monumental Pictures (her horn-rimmed glasses mysteriously vanished) simpered and blushed like a June bride.

“Seriously,” he was telling her, “you ought to be up on the silver screen yourself, instead of hidden away behind this desk.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I’m too old for that,” she protested, with a coy smile that encouraged Mitch to argue the point.

“Hogwash! Lots of men prefer an experienced woman. Why, I’ll bet—”

“Sorry to take up so much of your time,” Frankie interrupted, smiling at the pair of them through clenched teeth. “If you’re ready, Mitch, we’ll let Miss Honeycutt get back to her work.”

“Oh, it was a pleasure, I’m sure,” the secretary insisted, clutching Mitch’s sleeve as if she intended to keep him there by force. “Until seven o’clock, then?”

“Seven,” echoed Mitch, sounding oddly deflated.

Frankie bit her tongue until they were safely outside, but as soon as they reached the relative privacy of Mitch’s car, she rounded on him.

“What the—the heck was
that
all about?” Her sense of betrayal drowned out even Mama’s well-known opinion of ladies who used slang.

“Dammit, what took you so long?” demanded Mitch, who had no such qualms where language was concerned. “Another five minutes and I might have been engaged to that woman!”

“Funny, but you didn’t seem to be suffering!”

“No, that part comes later. Seven o’clock tonight, to be exact.”

“What happens at seven?” Frankie asked, curiosity overcoming indignation.

Mitch sighed. “I have a date.”

Frankie’s eyes grew round. “With Miss Honeycutt? But she’s
years
older than you!”

“Some men prefer experienced women,” Mitch repeated his own words with bitter irony.

“But if you didn’t want to go out with her, why did you ask her?”

“Are you kidding? That phone of hers was blinking like a blasted traffic light. I had to do something to keep her occupied.” He gave her a sidelong glance as he shifted the car into gear. “I hope it was worth it.”

“Oh, it was! I found phone numbers written on Mr. Cohen’s blotter, and one of them turned out to be some gambling person named Eddie. Mitch, I think Mr. Cohen had been losing a lot of money betting on racehorses!”

“Come to think of it, he told us he preferred them to team sports, remember? Go on, what else did this Eddie tell you?”

“He thought I was Mrs. Cohen, which means he’s never met Letitia Lamont, because if he had, he would never mistake my voice for hers. And he intends to make her pay off her husband’s gambling debts, even if she has to go to work in a hardware store.”

“A hardware store?” Mitch echoed in bewilderment. “Why would she do that? I mean, it’s hard to picture a former goddess of the silent screen peddling nuts and bolts.”

“I thought so, too, but that’s what he said. And he said something else that struck me as strange.”

“What now? Did he suggest she get a job at the dry cleaner’s?”

Frankie refused to take the bait. “No, he suggested she put some man up for auction. Can people do that?”

“Who was the man, did he say?”

“Someone named Oscar.”

“Aha!” exclaimed Mitch as enlightenment dawned. “Elementary, my dear Watson. You are forgetting you’re not in Georgia anymore. In this town, Oscar isn’t a person. He’s a little gold statue of a guy holding a sword.”

“That’s it!” Frankie cried, bouncing on the seat in her excitement. “Letitia Lamont won an Oscar for her work in
A Brand from the Burning
. It was five or six years ago—one of the last silent films to win an Academy Award.”

“I guess it would bring a pretty penny then, huh? Collectors would probably pay a fortune for a piece of movie history.”

“She won a lot of other awards, too,” Frankie said thoughtfully. “Do you think that was what Eddie meant by selling hardware—auctioning off her trophies and plaques and things?”

“Could be,” Mitch said, not entirely convinced. “But you said he mentioned a store.”

Frankie closed her eyes, trying to recreate the conversation. “Not exactly. He said she could ‘hock the hardware’ if she needed money.”

“Don’t stray from the script,” Mitch scolded.

Frankie’s brown eyes grew round as a memory clicked into place. “And that’s exactly what she’s doing!”

“What? Straying from the script?” asked Mitch, all at sea.

“No, silly! She’s been selling off souvenirs. At her house I noticed big blank spots on the wall where portraits must have hung. But now that I think of it, there wasn’t a picture of her in
A Brand from the Burning
, or
Another Reapeth
, or several of her other most famous roles.”

“Maybe she sold the most valuable ones first, to get Eddie off her back.”

“Or maybe Mr. Cohen had sold them himself, while he was still alive.”

“So he’d already gambled away his own fortune, and was starting to make dents in his wife’s? Now, there’s a motive for murder.”

“You think Eddie killed him?” Frankie asked, baffled by his logic.

“No, Eddie would have had every reason to want him alive. But the little woman might have been displeased, to say the least.”

“She didn’t seem exactly prostrate with grief,” Frankie admitted. “She didn’t seem awfully surprised, either. She said he was under a lot of stress, with his work and all.”

“Yeah, it must have been a hard way to live, having beautiful girls throwing themselves at you, begging you to make them a star,” Mitch drawled.

“But if she had been at the studio that day, surely someone must have mentioned seeing her there. Besides, she couldn’t have gotten into his office anyway. He already had an appointment, either with a jeweler or a woman named Ruby.” She explained the cryptic note scrawled on the blotter.

“Maybe his wife
is
Ruby,” Mitch suggested. “Letitia Lamont sure sounds like a stage name to me.”

“It is. But according to
Picture Play
, her real name was Annie Crumb.”

Mitch made a face. “I can see why she changed it.”

But Frankie lost interest in the producer’s wife as a new idea occurred to her. “Mitch, you don’t suppose Mr. Cohen
wanted
to die, do you?”

“Committed suicide, you mean? I don’t know, Frankie, that’s an awfully big leap.”

“But if he’d gotten in over his head with Eddie and saw no way of getting out, it might have seemed like his only option. He’d know how to do it, too, with that stuff he drank for his stomach. He seems to have been warned about it often enough.” His doctor would know, she thought. This Dr. Winston would know if Arthur Cohen had been depressed, or frightened, or just plain jumpy. Of course, he might consider that information confidential and refuse to tell her anything at all, but she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

“Maybe we should drive down to Santa Anita and ask a few questions,” Mitch suggested.  

“What’s at Santa Anita?”

“Horseracing. I’m guessing it’s where Arthur Cohen played the ponies.”

“A racetrack?” Frankie’s wide brown eyes grew troubled. “I don’t know, Mitch, Mama doesn’t approve of gambling.”

“Mama won’t know unless you tell her,” he pointed out. “How about tomorrow morning? Pick you up at ten?”

“It’s a good idea, Mitch, really it is, but I can’t.” Seeing the knowing grin he cast in her direction, she added quickly, “It’s not because of Mama. I have an appointment tomorrow, that’s all.”

The large Mediterranean bulk of the Studio Club loomed up on the right, and Mitch wheeled up to the curb and braked to a stop. Frankie, climbing out on the passenger side, was surprised to see Mitch sliding from beneath the wheel, clearly intending to walk her to the door.

“I wish I could invite you in, but I need to wash my hair before I go to work. Maybe you could come by the Starlight Ballroom tonight and we could make plans for going to Santa Anita another day.”

Mitch grimaced. “I’ve already got plans. I have a date tonight, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.” She felt a pang of envy for Mitch, who at worst would spend a couple of hours at a movie theater with an overeager spinster while she, Frankie, would be dragged about the dance floor by every stage door Johnny with spare change in his pocket. Or was it the overeager spinster that she envied? No, that was ridiculous; Miss Honeycutt wouldn’t have a date with Mitch at all if he hadn’t been worried that her own prolonged absence might make the secretary suspicious. She should be jealous of Frankie, instead of the other way ‘round. The knowledge made her grateful to Mitch and aware of her own feminine power.

“I’m sorry I dragged you into this
.
” She laid her hand on his arm. “If it makes you feel any better, I do think I got a couple of good leads, and—and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have guarding my back.”

And quickly, before she lost her nerve, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, then turned and hurried into the Studio Club without looking back.

Chapter 12

Casanova’s Big Night (1954)

Directed by Norman Z. McLeod

Starring Bob Hope, Joan Fontaine, and Basil Rathbone

Mitch prepared for his date that evening in a far more cheerful frame of mind than the occasion warranted. Frankie had kissed him. True, the kiss was inspired more by gratitude than any passion for himself, but it was a start, and all because she was grateful to him for holding Miss Honeycutt at bay—watching her back, she’d said. Well, he’d be more than happy to watch her front, too; so many of a female’s best parts were located there.