Silent Murders (32 page)

I knew what had happened. I hoped Faye didn’t.

She did.

“No it isn’t, you fool. Turn around.”

I gestured helplessly, asking without words how I was supposed to accomplish such a feat without gasoline, hoping her disgust with my ineptitude would cause her to set down the gun and take the wheel herself. No such luck.

“You don’t need gas. Roll backward and turn.”

I released the brake and did as I was told, letting gravity pull the car downhill as I turned the wheel hard left and reversed direction.

“Now start the car,” she ordered. “Drive backward.”

The car started right up, as I knew it would once the fuel could slosh forward to reach the carburetor. Ford flivvers were notorious for having to be driven backward uphill when fuel was low.

“You’ll run out of fuel before you can get away,” I told her as I twisted around to see the road behind me. Now her gun was pointing straight at my heart.

She sent me a smug smile. “Never you worry about me, dear.”

We stuck to the main road until Faye said stop. It was almost exactly the same place Carl had left his police car Monday night, below the Hollywoodland letters but far enough away to be outside the light cast by all those bulbs.

I thought of the caretaker, the one Carl said had a cottage behind the
H.
I had not seen it that night, nor could I tonight—all performers know that light in your face erases the audience, so anything that might have existed behind the letters was obscured from view. Carl had said that the caretaker wasn’t on duty all the time. I fervently hoped he was home tonight. He was my one chance.

“Get out.”

I slammed the door hard and began talking very loudly. “What are you planning to do, Faye? You can’t get away with killing me, you know. Everyone will know Faye Gordon did it.”

“Shout to heaven, fool. There’s no one around to hear.” She motioned toward the sign with her gun, a tiny pearl-handled pistol that looked familiar. A lady’s gun. I’d seen it before. Of course. It was the one David had pried from Lottie’s fingers that night at Pickfair and handed to Douglas, the one Douglas had set on the mantel. Faye must have picked it up later when no one was looking. And now Crazy Faye was going to shoot me with Lottie’s gun and pin my murder on Lottie Pickford.

41

“It will never work, Faye. You may have Lottie’s gun, but no one is going to believe Lottie shot me. For one thing, your fingerprints will be on the gun, and if you wipe them off, you’ll wipe off Lottie’s, too, and leave nothing to connect the crime to her. You still have time to get away. Leave now and you’ll have a huge head start.”

“Shut up. You don’t know anything.”

I picked my way over the rocky terrain toward the edge of the light. Faye stayed close behind me. By then, I’d decided on an escape plan, sadly predictable but the only one that came to mind. I would make a run for it, gambling on Faye’s poor marksmanship, the inaccuracy of Lottie’s stubby Belgian pistol, and my own agility. If I could dash out of this lighted area, I could disappear into the darkness behind the sign.

Maybe she could read minds, or maybe it was the obvious move of a desperate person, but just as I tensed, preparing to spring to one side, a hard shove against my back sent me sprawling to the ground. Prickly scrub scraped my hands and elbows and thistles tore the sleeves of my blouse.

“This is far enough.”

Bleeding, I started to get to my feet but she kicked one leg out from under me. I fell forward, my skirt tangled in my legs. “Stay right there. You’re not going anywhere.” She reached into her large handbag and pulled out a thermos. Tossing it to me, she stepped back out of reach and sneered. “No more wasting time. Pour yourself a cocktail.”

Faye’s beverage of choice. Bichloride of mercury. I was going to suffer the same fate as Paul Corrigan.

Slowly I unscrewed the thermos. The lid made a cup with a thin handle. Slowly I poured a little liquid into the cup. I considered dumping it out, but then she’d use the gun, her ace up the sleeve. “Don’t stint yourself,” she taunted. “Fill it up.”

I realized our position had not been chosen randomly. At the edge of the light, Faye could see what I was doing quite clearly. There was no cover of darkness to hide me, no spilling the poisonous brew without her noticing. And once I swallowed it, it wouldn’t matter if the caretaker were home or not. He could have telephoned for the whole U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hills, and it would be too late.

Long experience with magic acts had taught me that the secret of most tricks was misdirection. There on that cold, scrubby hill in Hollywood, it came to me that misdirection was the only chance I had to see tomorrow. Carefully holding the full cup by its handle in my right hand, I set the thermos on the ground beside me and palmed a rock with my left. I rearranged my legs a bit so that the loose fabric of my skirt folded into my lap between my thighs. Positioning my cup hand inches above my lap, I held it rigid. When I was ready, I locked onto Faye’s glittering eyes for a long moment, then I looked pointedly over her shoulder and gave a stage gasp.

“What’s that?” I cried and at the same instant, let fly the rock in that direction. It clattered harmlessly to the ground.

Most people will instinctively follow motion and noise with their eyes, and Faye proved no exception to the rule. It was all I needed, one fleeting second when her attention flickered away from me; one blink of the eye when her head turned slightly. Then she was facing me again with a look of incredulity mixed with fury. The gun wavered in her hand. Clearly she wanted to shoot me, and holding back took a lot of effort.

“Oh, that was clever!” she said in a voice heavy with sarcasm. “What an ass you are. Now drink up, and be quick about it.”

During that moment of brief distraction, while her eyes left me for the time it took to blink, I had twisted my wrist a quarter turn, dumping the poison into my lap and righting the cup in the exact same position. The tiny movement went unnoticed. The cup was empty.

I put it to my lips and pretended to drink, making my throat bobble as best I could by swallowing saliva. I took my time.

“Let me see,” she demanded as I took the cup from my lips. I held it out so she could see it was empty. She gave a satisfied smile. “Now the rest.”

A trick like that was not going to work twice. I clumsily tipped over the thermos, spilling the remaining poison in the dirt.

She merely shrugged. “So what? You’ve already drunk twice as much as Paul. But just in case, I’ll wait right here till the stuff works like it’s supposed to.” She lowered herself onto a flat rock, her elbow resting on her knees and the gun pointed square at my face. “I’d hate to have to shoot you after all this trouble. I’d planned this to be another sad case of suicide.”

“Suicide? Like Lorna McCall’s supposed suicide?”

“No, not at all like hers. That was an impulse. I gave her the poison, too, you know, the same mercury stuff you just drank. There’s no harm in telling you now. You’re already dead. Poor Lorna. So very, very dumb. She actually believed me when I came to her door, begging her pardon for my behavior at the party. I said we should be like sisters from now on. It was a stellar performance on my part, if I do say so myself. She was still suffering from a hangover, but the nitwit invited me in and served coffee and cake. I poured the poison in the coffeepot, and the little slut gulped it down. So there we were, getting along famously, when she was taken with a sudden stomach cramp. I followed her into the bathroom where she got violently sick, and as she sat there retching, her head hanging over the toilet, I got the idea to hold it down. It was a kindness really—a faster death, putting her out of her misery. And it meant that no one looked in her stomach for poison. They just figured the same person killed Lorna as killed Bruno and that waitress.”

“Just like you planned.” Once Faye thought I’d swallowed the poison, her whole demeanor changed. Eager to demonstrate her own cleverness, she became downright chatty, confiding in me as if I were an old friend. An occasional prompt from me was all it took to keep her going.

“Not like I’d planned at all. I’d been thinking about how to get rid of her for months, and I’d already bought the poison when Bruno conveniently got himself murdered. And when that waitress who had seen his murderer got herself killed, it gave me a better idea, to make it look like Lorna was another witness being bumped off.”

“Lorna took parts away from you?”

“That little piece of trash went around telling people I was responsible for her Big Break … that my lousy screen test got her hired. It was humiliating. And she told everyone I was thirty-five, when I’m only twenty-nine.”

“Why kill Paul?”

Her lips curled. “That has-been?” She switched the gun from hand to hand as she thought about something. “You know, I really didn’t want to kill Paul. We were lovers once. He forced my hand. I was afraid he would figure out what I’d done to Lorna, and he did. He was threatening to go to the police. I couldn’t let that happen.”

I recalled Paul’s odd behavior at the Fairbanks’ dinner table. “He figured it out at Pickfair that night, didn’t he?”

She nodded. “He telephoned me after we got home and accused me of killing Lorna. I denied it, of course. But he remembered that I was with him when Lottie called to tell him about Bruno and the waitress being killed. Lottie was all atwitter about the unmentionables she had left at Bruno’s house, worried her husband and the press would find out and cause a ruckus. Paul and I talked about Lottie afterward, and that’s when I got my idea. I went straight to Lorna’s house with the poison I’d bought the week before. Well, Paul said he was taking his suspicions to the police in the morning. I told him I was innocent and that I could show him proof if he’d stop by Paramount first. He walked right into my trap, the poor old fool.” She smiled and shook her head.

“You poisoned the coffee.”

“Luckily no one came by while he was writhing on the floor. He almost got out of the room to get help, so I bashed him over the head with the chair.”

“No one noticed his head?”

“I told the police it was from when he fell. Once he was down, he lay still, gasping and blinking at me something fierce and turning purple and so ugly I had to look at the ceiling. By the time Sophie came in for Rudy’s coffee, he couldn’t speak. Do you know, he wasn’t dead for hours. People thought he was dead when they carried him out on the stretcher, but it takes longer than that. I know. I was at the hospital with him. He died hours later in the hospital. It took hours and hours to finally kill him.” Reminded of the time, she looked at her watch, probably gauging how much longer before the poison began working on me. I thought it prudent to clutch my stomach and make a face. No doubt poor Lorna had done the same.

“It won’t take so long for you. You drank lots more than Paul did.”

I grimaced and bent double.

Faye heaved an impatient sigh. “I hope you won’t be much longer. I’ve got a long walk ahead of me back to town.”

“You’re walking back?”

“Well, it wouldn’t make a very convincing suicide if I were to take your car, would it?”

“No one will believe I committed suicide.”

“They will when they read your confession.” She took a folded piece of paper from inside her blouse and wafted it like a fan. “Typed, of course.” She played as if to show it to me, taunting me and waving it closer before pulling it out of my reach, then finally putting it back inside her blouse.

“That won’t work, Faye. Douglas knows everything I know. He’ll go to the police when I don’t show up at his house tonight.”

“Douglas Fairbanks is dead.”

She paused on a dramatic note, as if waiting for applause. My stomach really did hurt now. “What?”

“You killed him. You’ll be in all the newspapers. ‘The girl who murdered Douglas Fairbanks, then took her own life in remorse.’ It’s all in here.” She gave a smug smile and patted the letter, wordlessly inviting me to coax it out of her. She wanted me to beg. I wanted to deny her the satisfaction, but I had to know what she had done to Douglas.

“Tell me, Faye. Please tell me, before I die.”

“Well … all right. Why not? Who are you going to tell out here? The snakes?” She laughed gaily. “It goes like this: you and Douglas have been having a love affair for weeks now—everyone knows you’re in and out of his dressing room—but he decided he couldn’t continue to deceive his dear Mary, so he broke it off. You couldn’t bear it. You sent a lovely box of chocolate-covered cherries to his house as a parting gift. But you put a dose of cocaine in each one, enough to kill him if he eats more than one, and everyone knows he can’t stop at one.”

She looked at a dainty wristwatch and frowned. “They probably aren’t finished with dinner yet, but they will be soon. You know how their dinner parties go. After the meal comes the film and the cigars and chocolates.”

I tried to convince myself that Douglas would be suspicious of a box of candy unexpectedly delivered to his home, but the man was so trusting he seldom saw any deviousness in others. My name on the card could indeed blind him to the danger. The plan was so transparent, it just might work.

“How could you do this to Mary? She’s been your friend for years.”

“Oh, pooh. Mary will be fine. She never eats sweets. Too bad about anyone else who dips into Douglas’s chocolate box.”

“You’ll never get away with this, Faye,” I said with as much conviction as I could, considering she was well on her way to doing just that. If only I could get free, find the caretaker’s cottage, and telephone Pickfair to warn Douglas!

It was time for me to die.

42

Fortunately, dying came easy. I had played Cleopatra so many times, on stages from Alberta to Alabama, that once I’d launched her death scene, the motions followed of their own accord. Instinctively I clutched my hand to my breast, as if holding the asp that killed the Queen of the Nile, gasped, and doubled up like a jackknife. Deleting the dialogue, I concentrated on choking piteously, groaning a little—I was saving the louder groans for later—and doubling up until my head had dropped almost between my legs.