The hollywood murders, p.2
The Hollywood Murders, page 2
Being totally blind to the subtleties of feminine conduct, Walter did not perceive that Miss Jardin was also going through a trying experience. But Rhys Jardin, physically a father, had had to develop the sixth sense of a mother in such matters. “Your golf is off six strokes,” he said sternly one morning as Pink mauled and pounded him on the rubbing table in the gymnasium, “and I found a wet handkerchief on the terrace last night. What’s the matter, young lady?”
Val viciously punched the bag. “Nothing’s the matter!”
“Filberts,” jeered Pink, slapping his employer. “You had another fight with that wacky twerp last night.”
“Silence, Pink,” said her father. “Can’t a man have a private conversation with his own daughter?”
“If that punk calls you a ‘parasite’ again, Val,” growled Pink, digging his knuckles into Jardin’s abdomen, “I’ll knock his teeth out. What’s a parasite?”
“Pink, you were listening!” cried Val indignantly. “This is one heck of a household, that’s all I can say!”
“Can I help it if you talk loud?”
Val glared at him and plucked a pair of Indian clubs from the rack in the wall-closet.
“Now, Pink,” said Rhys, “I won’t have eavesdropping. … What else did Walter call her?”
“A lot more fancy names, and then she starts to bawl, so he hauls off and kisses her one.”
“Pink,” snarled Val, swishing the clubs, “you’re an absolute louse.”
“And what did my puss do?” asked Rhys comfortably. “A little more on the pectorals, Pink.”
“She give him the chorus girl’s salute—like she meant it, too. I mean, that was a kiss.”
“Very interesting,” said Val’s father, closing an eye.
Val flung one of the Indian clubs in the general direction of the rubbing table, and Pink calmly ducked and went on kneading his employer’s brown flesh. The club cracked against the far brick wall. Val sat down on the floor and wailed: “I might as well entertain my friends in the Hollywood Bowl!”
“Nice boy,” said her father. “Nice lad, Walter.”
“He’s an oomph!” snapped Val, jumping up. “He and his ‘social consciousness’! He makes me sick.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Pink, massaging. “There’s something in it. The little guy don’t get much of the breaks.”
“Pink, you keep out of this!”
“See what I mean?” complained Pink. “This master and man stuff. I should keep out of it. Why? Because I’m a wage slave. Turn over, Rhys.”
His employer docilely turned over and Pink set about trying to crack his spine. “You don’t have to see the boy, Val—ouch!”
“I should think,” said Val in a frigid voice, “that I’m old enough to solve my own problems—without interference.” And she flounced off.
And Walter was a problem. Sometimes he romped like a child, and at other times he positively snorted gloom. One moment he was trying to break her back in a movie kiss, and the next he was calling her names. And all because she wasn’t interested in labor movements and didn’t know a Left Wing from a Right, except in fried chicken! It was all very confusing, because of late Val had had practically to sit on her hands; they had developed a sort of incorporeal itch. Either they wanted to muss his unruly black hair and stroke his lips and run over his sandpaper cheeks—he always seemed to need a shave—or they yearned to hit him on the point of his dear longish nose.
The situation was complicated by the fact that Solomon Spaeth and her father had gone into business together. Rhys Jardin in business, after all these splendid idle years! Val could not decide whether she disliked rubicund Solly more for his oozy self than for what he was doing to her father. There were tedious conferences with lawyers, especially a wet-faced little one by the name of Ruhig—arguments and contracts and negotiations and things. Why, Rhys neglected his yachting, golf, and polo for three whole weeks—he barely had time for his Swedish exercises under Pink’s drill-sergeant direction! But that wasn’t the worst of it. It was what happened at Sans Souci after the contracts were signed.
Sans Souci dated from the careless, golden days. It occupied half a dozen acres high in the Hollywood hills and was designed for exclusiveness, with a ten-foot fence of stout peeled-willow stakes all round to keep out hucksters and trailer tourists, and a secondary paling of giant royal palms to make their envious mouths water. Inside there were four dwellings of tile, stucco, plaster, and tinted glass which were supposed to be authentic Spanish and were not. The development was shaped like a saucer, with the four houses spacing the rim and all the rear terraces looking down upon the communal depression in the center, where the democratic architect had laid out a single immense swimming pool surrounded by rock gardens.
Rhys Jardin had bought one of the houses because the realtor was an old acquaintance in need—an empty gesture, for the bank foreclosed promptly after the depression began and the realtor shot his brains out by way of his mouth. Valerie thought the place ghastly, but their dingy expensive shack at Malibu and their bungalow-villa on the Santa Monica Palisades always seethed with people, so Sans Souci’s promise of privacy attracted her.
The second house was occupied by a male star with a passion for Dandie Dinmonts, whose barking made life a continuous agony until their owner suddenly married an English peeress who carried him and his beasts off to dazzle the British cinema public, leaving the house happily unoccupied except for brief annual visits.
The third house was tenanted for a time by a foreign motion picture director who promptly had an attack of delirium tremens at the edge of the pool; so that worked out beautifully, because he was whisked off to a sanitarium and never returned.
The fourth house had never been occupied at all. That is, until Solly Spaeth bought it from the bank “to be nearer my associate,” as he beamingly told Valerie, “your worthy and charming father.” And when the insufferable Solly moved in, Walter moved in, too.
There was the rub. Walter moved in. The creature was so inconsistent. He didn’t have to live there. In fact, he had been living alone in a furnished room in Los Angeles until his father took the Sans Souci estate. The Spaeths didn’t get along—small wonder, considering Walter’s ideas! But suddenly it was peaches and cream between them—for a whole week, anyway—with Solly bestowing his oleaginous benediction and Walter accepting it glumly and moving right in, drawing board, economic theories, and all. And there he was, only yards away at any given hour of the day or night, making life miserable… preaching, criticizing her charge accounts and décolletage and the cut of her bathing suits, fighting with his father like an alley cat, drawing inflammatory cartoons for the Independent under the unpleasant nom de guerre of WASP, heatedly lecturing Rhys Jardin for his newly assumed “utilities overlordship,” whatever that meant, scowling at poor Pink and insulting Tommy and Dwight and Joey and all the other nice boys who kept hopefully bouncing back to Sans Souci… until she was so angry she almost didn’t want to return his kisses—when he kissed her, which wasn’t often; and then only, as he hatefully expressed it, “in a moment of animal weakness.”
And when Winni Moon came to live at the Spaeth house as Solly’s “protégée,” with her beastly beribboned chimp and a rawboned Swedish chaperon who was supposed to be her aunt—you would have thought a self-respecting moralist would move out then. But no, Walter hung on; and Valerie even suspected the impossible Winni of having designs on her benefactor’s son, from certain signs invisible to the Spaeths but quite clear to the unprejudiced female eye.
Sometimes, in the sacred privacy of her own rooms, Valerie would confide in little Roxie, her Chinese maid. “Do you know what?” she would say furiously.
“Yisss,” Roxie would say, combing out Val’s hair.
“It’s fantastic. I’m in love with the beast, damn him!”
Walter leaned on his horn until Frank, the day man, unlocked the gate. The crowd in the road was silent with a rather unpleasant silence. Five State troopers stood beside their motorcycles before Sans Souci, looking unhappy. One little man with the aura of a tradesman leaned glassy-eyed on the shaft of a homemade sign which said: “Pity The small Invester.” The crowd was composed of tradespeople, white-collar workers, laborers, small-business men. That, thought Walter grimly, accounted for the inactivity of the troopers; these solid citizens weren’t the usual agitating mob. Walter wondered how many of the five troopers had also lost money in Ohippi.
Driving through the gate and hearing Frank quickly clang it shut, Walter felt a little sick. These people knew him by now, and the name he bore. He did not blame them for glaring at him. He would not have blamed them if they had tossed the troopers aside and broken down the fence. He ran his six-cylinder coupé around to the Jardin house. More than a dozen cars were parked in the Jardin drive—sporty cars of the same breed as their owners, Walter thought bitterly. Valerie must be fiddling again—while Rome burned.
He found her in the front gardens radiantly holding off all the sad young men and their ladies with one hand and offering them delicatessen with the other. At first Walter blinked, for it seemed as though Val was plucking salami and sausages from the rose bushes; and he had never heard of bologna sandwiches and one-drink cocktail bottles growing on palm boles before. But then he saw that the refreshments had been artfully tied to the arboreal landscape.
“Oh, it’s Walter,” said Val, the radiance dimming. Then she stuck out her chin. “Walter Spaeth, if you mention one word about the starving coal-miners I’ll scream!”
“Look out,” giggled a young lady, “here’s Amos again.”
“Wasn’t he the prophet who flapped his arms so much?”
“Goodbye, Val,” said Tommy. “I’ll see you in the first tumbril.”
“Val,” said Walter, “I want to talk to you.”
“Why not?” said Val sweetly, and excused herself. She maintained the sweet smile only until they were behind a cluster of palms. “Walter, don’t you dare spoil my party. It’s a brand-new idea, and I’ve got Tess and Nora and Wanda simply tearing their permanents—” She looked a little more closely at his face. “Walter, what’s the matter?”
Walter flung himself on the grass and kicked the nearest palm. “Plenty, my feminine Nero.”
“Tell me!”
“Bottom’s dropped out. Hell’s loose. River topped the levees last night—out of control. The whole Ohio Valley and part of the Mississippi Valley are under water. So there, may they rest in peace, go the Ohippi plants.”
Valerie felt a sudden chill. It didn’t seem fair that the floods in a place half a continent away should creep into her garden and spoil everything. She leaned against the palm. “How bad is it?” she asked in a croupy little voice.
“The plants are a total loss.”
“First the stock-market drop, and now— Poor pop.” Val took off her floppy sunhat and began to punch it. Walter squinted up at her. It was going to be tough on the kid, at that. Well, maybe it would do her good. All this criminal nonsense—
“It’s your father’s fault!” cried Val, hurling the hat at him.
“Ain’t it the truth?” said Walter.
Val bit her lip. “I’m sorry, darling. I know how much you hate what he stands for.” She sank down and laid her head on his chest. “Oh, Walter, what are we going to do?”
“Hey, you’re wetting my tie,” said Walter. He kissed her curls gently.
Val jumped up, dried her eyes, and ran away. Walter heard her call out in a marvelously bright voice: “Court’s adjourned, people!” and a chorus of groans.
Just then it began to drizzle, with that dreary persistence only the California clouds can achieve during the rainy season. It’s like a movie, thought Walter gloomily, or a novel by Thomas Hardy. He got to his feet and followed her.
They found Rhys Jardin patrolling the flags of his terrace at the rear of the house. Pink, in sweat-shirt and sneakers, was staring at his employer with troubled eyes.
“Oh, there you are,” said her father. He immediately sat down in the porch swing. “Come here, puss. The rain’s spoiled your party, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, pop!” said Val, and she ran to him and put her arms about his neck. The rain pattered on the awning.
“Well, Walter,” smiled Rhys, “as a prophet you’re pretty good. But not even you foresaw the floods.”
Walter sat down. Pink heaved out of his deck-chair and went to the iron table and poured himself a drink of water. Then he said: “Nuts!” and sat down again.
“Is anything left?” asked Val quietly.
“Don’t look so tragic, Val!”
“Is there?”
“Well, now that you ask,” smiled Rhys, “not a thing. Our negotiable assets are cleaned out.”
“Then why did you let me run this party today?” she cried. “All that money going to waste!”
“I never thought I’d live to see the day,” said Pink lightly, “when Val Jardin would start squeezing the buffalo.”
“Do we have to give up the Malibu place, the house in Santa Monica?” asked Val with difficulty.
“Now don’t worry, puss—”
“This—this house, too?”
“You never liked it, anyway.”
Val cradled her father’s head in her arms. “Darling, you’ll have to give up your yachting and golf clubs and things and go to work. How will you like that?”
The big man made a face. “We can realize a lot of money from the real estate and the furnishings—”
“And we’ll get rid of Mrs. Thomson and the housemaids and Roxie—”
“No, Val!”
“Yes. And of course Pink will have to go—”
“Nuts,” said Pink again.
Val became quiet and sat back in the swing, sucking her lower lip. After a while Walter said uncomfortably: “I know my anti-holding-company cartoons didn’t help Ohippi, Mr. Jardin. But you understand—Newspapermen can’t—”
Jardin laughed. “If I listened to your advice rather than your father’s we’d all be a lot better off.”
“The lousy part of it is,” grunted Pink, “that your old man could still save Ohippi. Only he won’t. There ought to be a law!”
“What do you mean?” asked Walter slowly.
Pink waved his arms. “Well, he cleaned up, didn’t he? Why shouldn’t he—”
“My father cleaned up?”
“Keep quiet, Pink,” said Rhys.
“Just a moment. I’ve a right to know!”
“It’s not important any more, Walter,” said Rhys mildly. “Forget it.”
“Forget your grandmother!” yelled Pink. “Go on, tell him about that cat-fight you had with Spaeth this morning!”
Jardin shrugged. “You know, your father and I were equal partners. Whenever he arranged to form a new holding company—he created seven before the government stepped in—the corporation would retain control of the common stock and put the remaining forty-nine percent on the market. The preferred stock we held back, splitting share and share alike.”
“Yes?” said Walter.
“Pop. Don’t,” said Val, looking at Walter’s face.
“Go on, Mr. Jardin.”
“Knowing nothing about these things, I trusted your father and Ruhig completely. Ruhig advised me to hold on to my preferred—it did seem wise, because the basic Ohippi plants were perfectly sound. Secretly, however, through agents, your father sold his preferred as the companies were created. And now, with all the stockholders caught, he’s sitting back there with a fortune.”
“I see,” said Walter; he was pale. “And he led me to believe—”
“With the dough he’s made,” raved Pink, “he could rebuild those power plants and put ’em on their feet again. We got some rights, ain’t we? We—”
“You lost money, too?”
Rhys Jardin winced. “I’m afraid I sucked in a lot of my friends—in my early innocence.”
“Excuse me,” said Walter, and he rose and went down the terrace steps into the rain.
“Walter!” cried Val, flying after him. “Please!”
“You go on back,” said Walter, without stopping.
“No!”
“This is my business. Go back.”
“Just the same,” said Val breathlessly, “I’m coming.”
She clung to his arm all the way around the pool and up the rocky slope to the Spaeth house.
Val remained nervously on the Spaeth terrace. “Walter, please don’t do anything that—” But it was half a whisper, and Walter was already stalking through the glass doors into his father’s study.
Mr. Solomon Spaeth sat at his oval desk, the picture of baronial gravity, shaking his head a little at the rapid-fire questions of a crowd of newspapermen. His reading glasses rested on the middle of his fat nose, and with his paunch and thin gray hair and sober air he did not remotely resemble the devil and worse that the stockholders at the gate were calling him.
“Gentlemen, please,” he protested.
“But how about the flood story, Mr. Spaeth?”
“Are you going on?”
“Where’s that statement you promised?”
“I’ll give you just this.” Solly picked up a paper and fussed with it. The reporters grew quiet. Solly put the paper down. “Owing to the catastrophe in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys,” he said gravely, “our field men report the complete ruin of our equipment. That hydro-electric machinery would cost millions to replace, gentlemen. I’m afraid we shall have to abandon the plants.”
There was a shocked silence. Then a man exclaimed: “But that means a loss of a hundred cents on the dollar to every investor in Ohippi securities!”
Solly spread his hands. “It’s a great misfortune, gentlemen. But surely we can’t be held responsible for the floods? Floods are an act of God.”
The reporters did not even notice Walter in their scramble for the door. Walter stood still near the terrace doors. His lips were twisted a little. … His father rubbed his right jowl thoughtfully for a moment, and then began to read the afternoon papers.
