Sheri Cobb South (18 page)

* * * *

“What a day!” groaned Frankie, safe in the bedroom she shared with Kathleen. She stripped off her blue jacket and cast it onto the bed, then sat down on the edge of the mattress and kicked off her shoes.

Kathleen looked up from the little desk where she sat memorizing lines for her next audition. “Did everything go—” she paused discreetly— “all right?”

“ ‘All right’ doesn’t begin to cover it.” Frankie leaped up from the bed and began pacing the small room. “Kathleen, I’m onto something here, something big. That Dr. Winston isn’t a real doctor, at least, not the kind who helps sick people. He—well, he treats girls who are in trouble.”

Kathleen went limp with relief. “You mean you didn’t know? You’re not—?”

“What sort of girl do you think I am?” demanded Frankie, torn between amusement and outrage at this insult to her reputation. “I only went there because I found Dr. Winston’s telephone number on Arthur Cohen’s desk. Kathleen, don’t you see? Mr. Cohen could have gotten some actress in trouble—maybe even more than one—and sent them to this Dr. Winston.”

Kathleen shrugged. “Like I told you, Frankie, some girls will do anything for a chance at stardom.”

“But what if it didn’t work out that way?” A shadow crossed her face as she remembered the young women in Dr. Winston’s waiting room, their expressions showing varying degrees of anxiety and desperation. “What if afterwards she felt ashamed of what she’d done? Or what if Mr. Cohen went back on his word? Couldn’t some poor girl see that as justification for murder?”

Kathleen laid her script on the desk and smoothed out the pages. “I don’t know, Frankie, it seems to me an awfully big leap. Besides, even if it were true, how would you ever prove it? There’s no way to prove paternity, you know.”

Frankie sighed. “In this case, there’s no way to prove maternity, either. Most of the girls seem to use false names. Unless—” She paused in her pacing as a new idea struck her.

“Unless what?”

“Unless I could somehow get a look at Dr. Winston’s files. Surely those girls’ real names must appear somewhere.”

Kathleen raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Surely you don’t expect the doctor’s secretary to let you look through the file cabinet!”

“Actually,” Frankie confessed, “I was thinking of breaking in.”

Kathleen shook her head, making her blonde curls swing. “After what happened last time, Mitch said he was through with that sort of thing, remember?”

Frankie had the grace to look ashamed. “I wasn’t thinking of Mitch.”

“Who, then?”

“You.”

“
Me
? You must be joking!” Seeing from Frankie’s mulish expression that her roommate was quite serious, Kathleen added, “If you’re determined to go through with this—and I’m not at all certain you should—you ought to tell that policeman friend of yours and let him handle it.”

Frankie blushed crimson. “Kathleen! This isn’t the sort of thing you can discuss with a fellow!”

Kathleen did her best, but Frankie refused to be dissuaded. At last, the English girl reluctantly agreed to accompany her friend
,
expressing the not very hopeful opinion that she might somehow keep Frankie from bringing further trouble upon herself.

And so, long after curfew, both girls donned their darkest skirts and blouses and padded noiselessly down the stairs on stocking feet. They had a bad moment at the bottom of the stairs when they heard Pauline come in, late as usual, but they managed to steal into the shadows of the common room and remain out of sight until she had gone upstairs.

“Why did I let you talk me into this?” Kathleen hissed.

“
Shhh
!” was Frankie’s only reply.

Once outside, they slipped on their shoes and hurried to the end of the block, where they had arranged for a taxi to meet them. Traffic was light so late at night, and it seemed a very short time later that they were set down at the corner a short distance from Dr. Winston’s office. If the taxi driver was curious about their furtive behavior, he gave no sign, but Frankie tipped him generously anyway, just in case. They waited until the taxi had disappeared up the street, then Frankie unearthed a metal flashlight from the depths of her handbag and they walked up the sidewalk to the door of Dr. Winston’s office. Frankie had never been so thankful for its discreet distance from the street, or for the bushes that partially blocked its door from the view of passersby.

“Here, take this.” She handed the light to Kathleen. “Shine it on the lock so I can see what I’m doing.”

Picking a lock wasn’t nearly as easy as Mitch had made it look. Frankie mangled two bobby pins before she finally heard a faint click and the doorknob turned in her hand.

“At last!”

The two girls scurried inside and Frankie locked the door behind them. Suddenly a blinding light filled the room. Frankie whirled around to see Kathleen with her hand on the light switch.

“Turn that thing off!” She gestured angrily. “Do you want to get us both arrested?”

The room went dark again, but not before Frankie caught a glimpse of Kathleen’s stricken face.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you
.
” Frankie’s voice echoed in the empty room. “I guess I’m a little jumpy.”

“Perhaps we should just go home,” the British girl suggested.

“We can’t give up now, not after coming this far.” Frankie switched on her flashlight and played its beam against the adjacent wall until it illuminated the counter where she’d signed in that morning. “Come on, the office is this way. That’s where the records will be.”

Unfortunately for her quest, the door into the office was locked as tightly as the outer door, and this one proved even more resistant to Frankie’s bobby pin. In the end, Frankie took off her shoes and clambered over the counter, then unlocked the door from the inside to admit Kathleen. The two girls found themselves standing before a receptionist’s desk flanked by metal filing cabinets.

Frankie pointed to the one on the right. “I’ll take this one, and you can have that one.”

She pulled open the top drawer, cringing at the rasp of metal on metal, and began thumbing through the stacks of manila file folders. Half an hour later, she was almost ready to concede defeat. She’d had vague hopes of discovering a familiar name—Alice Howard, perhaps, who played Gwyneth in
The Virgin Queen
. Arthur Cohen had made some pretty nasty insinuations about her just before he died. But most of the girls who visited Dr. Winston chose to conceal their identities beneath false names. Besides the plethora of Smiths and Joneses, there were a couple of Jane Does and one Jane Q. Public. The only names that sounded remotely real were ones that had apparently been abandoned by their owners to conceal an unfashionable ethnicity or a blue-collar background, like Esther Mertz or Ruby Mudd. Mudd? The ridiculous name was strangely familiar, but Frankie couldn’t think where she might have heard it. She turned to her left, where Kathleen bent over a similar drawer of file folders, but even as she opened her mouth to ask her roommate for help, her memory provided the missing piece of the puzzle. She hadn’t heard the name before; she had seen it scrawled in ink on the upper left-hand corner of an air mail envelope.

She stared at Kathleen for a long moment, debating her next move. At last she took a deep breath, and when she spoke her voice shook slightly. “Ruby?”

Kathleen glanced up, the instinctive reaction of one hearing the name she’d answered to for the better part of twenty years. Upon seeing the stricken look on Frankie’s face, she realized her mistake. Her lips twisted in a humorless smile. “So you’ve figured it out at last, haven’t you?”

Frankie remembered her arrival at the Studio Club, when she’d first met her roommate. On that occasion, Kathleen had been in bed with an unspecified illness. Had she really been sick, or was she recovering from Dr. Winston’s procedure? Tears stung Frankie’s eyes at the thought of her friend undergoing such an ordeal alone, separated by a continent and an ocean from family and friends who might have helped her.

“Oh, how awful for you,” she breathed. “You must not have known what else to do.”

“I knew what to do, all right,” Kathleen, or rather Ruby, said with a bitter laugh. “Girls used to come to my Granny all the time when they got in trouble. Married women too, them that didn’t care to have a baby every year.”

Every trace of her clipped British speech had vanished, and now she spoke with an accent not unlike Frankie’s own. Frankie, her mind reeling, latched onto this relatively insignificant discovery. “You’re not really English?”

“Not unless you count New London, West Virginia, population two hundred and twelve.”

Feeling suddenly weak at the knees, Frankie groped for the edge of the cabinet for support. “But how—why—?”

“Because I knew there had to be more to life! Surely you ought to understand that, you felt the same way. I got married when I was fifteen—heaven knows there’s nothing else to do in New London!—and my husband took me to Wheeling for a weekend honeymoon. One day we went to the movies, and
Grand Hotel
was playing.” Kathleen’s face grew radiant with the memory. “Oh Frankie, I fell in love that day, and I don’t mean with my husband! For weeks afterwards, I would stand in front of the mirror and pretend to be Greta Garbo, acting out her part and reciting her lines.”

“What did your husband think?”

Kathleen shrugged, dismissing her husband as of no importance. “Oh, he didn’t know anything about it. I always waited until he was out working the farm. But I knew what I had to do. I saved up my butter-and-egg money for months until I had enough for the train fare, and then I just—left.”

“You
ran away
?” Frankie’s family hadn’t been exactly over the moon about her desire to go to Hollywood, but Mama had taken her to Atlanta to shop for a suitable wardrobe, and Mama, Daddy, and both her sisters and their families had seen her off at the railway station. Now, hearing her roommate’s story, Frankie hardly knew whether to be impressed with her bravery or appalled by her callousness.

Kathleen’s chin jerked upward, a small yet defensive gesture. “I guess you could call it running away. It didn’t feel like it to me, though. It felt like this was what I’d been waiting for my whole life.”

“But—but how did you manage? What did you do when you got here?”

A faint, sad smile crossed Kathleen’s face. “Funny thing is
,
I didn’t even think of that until I was halfway across the country. Lucky for me, I met a man at the station. His name was Herbert Finch. He gave me my first big break.”

Frankie felt a wave of resentment toward Mitch Gannon. If he hadn’t stopped her from going with Mr. Finch, she might have had her first big break by this time, too. Trust him to spoil everything!

“What was the name of the picture?” she asked eagerly. “Just think, I might have seen you and never even known!”

Kathleen shook her head. “It wasn’t—that kind—of film. I had five seconds on screen, dancing topless on a table.”

Frankie’s envious admiration turned abruptly to horror. “Kathleen, you didn’t! Surely they used some sort of special effects—they wouldn’t ask you to—”

“No, it was me up there, all right, in all my glory.”

Frankie opened her mouth, but no words would come.

Kathleen, seeing her shocked expression, added quickly, “It was only the one time, until something better came along. There are so many girls looking for work in this town, if I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”

“But—but—”

“Besides,” Kathleen added, squaring her shoulders proudly, “it paid off. Artie saw me in that film, and liked what he saw enough to offer me a contract with Monumental.”

Frankie was scandalized all over again. “Mr. Cohen went to a—a—a
girly picture
?”

“It stands to reason he would want to scout out new talent,” Kathleen insisted. “Oh Frankie, he was wonderful! He took care of everything. He gave me a new name, and a new life story, and he paid for speech lessons and took care of my rent at the Studio Club. He even promised me a leading role in one of his films. And all he asked in return was that I—”

“That you what?” demanded Frankie, very much afraid she already knew.

“It wasn’t like I was a virgin!” Kathleen’s voice rose on a note of hysteria. “I was a married woman, wed at fifteen because that was what my husband and my parents wanted. Well, what about what
I
wanted? Don’t
my
wishes count for anything?”

Frankie patted the other girl’s arm soothingly. “Of course they do.” She smiled brightly, hoping to give Kathleen’s thoughts a happier direction. “And he promised you a leading role? How wonderful! What’s the name of the picture?”

Kathleen’s snort of laughter held no hint of humor. “What else?
The Virgin Queen
.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you get it? I was supposed to play Gwyneth, Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting.”

“But—but Alice Harper is playing Gwyneth,” protested Frankie, growing ever more bewildered.

Kathleen’s bravado evaporated. She heaved a heavy sigh and gestured toward the medical file in Frankie’s hand. “I realized I was pregnant three weeks before casting began. I knew Artie would never marry me; there was never any question of that, even if he hadn’t already been married to someone else. But I thought he might send me away to have the baby and arrange for it to be adopted.”

“And he wouldn’t?”

“He told me to get rid of it—no ifs, ands, or buts. He gave me Dr. Winston’s name and address and said the studio would take care of the bill. Other than that, I was on my own.” Her hands moved restlessly over the desk, found a silver fountain pen, and toyed nervously with it. “So I did it. I’d come too far, given up too much. This was my big chance! I couldn’t let anything stand in my way.”

Frankie saw the girl’s increasing agitation, and as the pieces clicked into place she had the strange sensation that the ground had suddenly shifted beneath her feet. “When I met you, you were recovering from an illness,” she recalled, afraid to hear what happened next.

“When you met me, I was recovering from an abortion,” Kathleen said baldly. “When I returned to the studio to tell Artie the thing was done, I found out that not only had someone else gotten the part, they’d already started filming some of her scenes. He’d never meant to give me that part at all. He just wanted to get inside my knickers.”