Dead Extra Page 18

  Wilma followed it up with a dozen more popular tunes. The Bell women sang along when they could remember the words. Lottie steered her mother’s Cadillac through Malibu and Point Dume, past the Air Force base, and into the farmland of Camarillo. She parked near the administration building.

  Wilma stepped out of the backseat and looked across hospital grounds. She said, “Wow. I thought I’d never come back here.”

  Lottie wrapped an arm around Wilma’s shoulder and squeezed. “You and me both, sister.”

  Lavinia pointed across the parking lot to the steam rising from a long, narrow building. “That must be the laundry.”

  “It is,” Wilma said. In her book, she’d written about her dream of working at the laundry and getting a few moments each day to walk freely between the laundry and the wards. It was the best she could hope for then.

  Now, she was hoping for more. She and Lottie had planned this out. They’d been working on it since the day Wilma told Lottie about the money Ma Breedlove and John Sr. were extorting. Lottie knew more about Ma than Herbert Parker did. She told Wilma that Ma had never been the one jumping out of the closet, snapping photos of famous people having sex. It had always been John Sr.—Ma just hatched the scam. She seduced a rich or famous man occasionally. Mostly, she set up others and got John Sr. to photograph the scene. An old peeper like John Sr. was a specialist. He didn’t even have to jump out of a closet, if he didn’t want. He could get a shot of you in the act and leave you none the wiser.

  When Wilma found this out, she knew there had to be photos of Breedlove and Bell. Bell wouldn’t have funded the Hitching Post otherwise. And John Sr., if he took a picture like that, would keep a copy. Even if he sold the negative, he’d keep a clear, blown-up print and use it to reverse a new negative. All Wilma had to do was find that photo and throw a little blackmail at Bell to counter Ma Breedlove’s extortion racket.

  A man in a slick double-breasted suit emerged from the green door of the administration building. He called out, “Mrs. Bell?” Lavinia waved to him. The man asked, “Are you ready for the tour?”

  “Absolutely,” Lavinia said. She introduced Lottie and Wilma.

  The man shook Wilma’s hand and said, “Welcome to our little brain emporium.”

  He led them through the new construction on the north side of hospital grounds, talking about progress and the groundbreaking techniques of the doctors. “We’ve improved even since you ladies were here,” he said to Lottie and Wilma. The pair rolled their eyes.

  He bought them all coffee at the café, walked them along the laundry building, and led them into the main entrance of the hospital. Instead of steering Wilma and Lottie to the baths as they’d done before, he walked straight into a small courtyard. He and Lavinia took a seat on a bench overlooking a modest tile fountain. Wilma and Lottie stood nearby, half-listening to his pitch about the hospital. Wilma took in the courtyard, the blooming lilacs climbing the stucco walls, the fresh red paint on the iron railings of the upstairs balconies, a pair of goldfinches fluttering around a lush sweetgum, the owl in the bell tower, so still he looked carved in place. Lottie leaned against her and whispered, “Just like you remember it, kid?”

  Wilma pointed at the doctor’s office overlooking the courtyard. “Give me that room and I’ll finish my sentence for real. They can add all the time they want.”

  On the way out, Lavinia’s tour guide said to Wilma, “I enjoyed your book.”

  Wilma smiled. “Why not? You got off easy.”

  The man laughed, deep and phony, special-made for Lavinia’s ears.

  Lottie drove the Cadillac off hospital grounds and north to Oxnard. She parked at a diner next to the Hitching Post. She patted her mother’s knee. “I’m starving,” she said. “Let’s chow.”

  Lavinia didn’t want to go inside. In fact, she flat-out refused. Lottie and Wilma went in without her. Lavinia stood in the parking lot, trying to decide which she feared more: being alone in this neighborhood or taking a chance on the food in the diner. She followed the girls inside.

  She insisted on a table near the Cadillac in hopes of warding off potential car thieves. She asked the waitress to wipe the table down three separate times and still found the linoleum too sticky for her liking. She asked the waitress what the safest dish was and took her recommendation on the chicken salad. When the waitress left with their orders, Lavinia said to Lottie, “How did you ever find this lovely eatery?”

  “Wilma found it,” Lottie said. “Didn’t you, kid?”

  Wilma nodded. This was part of the plan. Lottie convinced Wilma that the truth, told to the right person, was stronger than blackmail. Wilma figured she’d give it a shot. She pointed at the cook sliding a tuna melt onto the expo line. “See that fellow there?” she asked Lavinia.

  Lavinia turned. “The cook?”

  Wilma nodded.

  “Seems a charming bloke.”

  “He saved my life,” Wilma said.

  “How? Did he spare you from eating this poisonous cuisine?”

  Lottie said, “No more jokes, Mother. You’re going to want to hear this.” She turned to Wilma. “Tell her how you got out of Camarillo.”

  “You finished your sentence,” Lavinia said. “I know. I read The Brain Emporium.”

  Wilma sipped water from a dirty glass. She took a deep breath. “Actually, I bent the truth a little in the book.”

  “In the whole thing?” Lavinia asked.

  Wilma shook her head. “Just in the end. Just about how I got out.”

  “What really happened?”

  “My sentence got extended. I worried they’d never let me out. And living with a bunch of crazy people will make you crazy after a while. Lottie will back me up on that. So this guard, a fellow named Giroux, cut me a deal. He told me if I played my ukulele at a stag party, he’d get me my walking papers.”

  “Sounds like a good deal,” Lavinia said.

  “So I thought. I agreed to it. Giroux drove me up to that dive next door to here. It was a Hollywood shindig. A couple dozen men from pictures. Some of them you know. Roderick Hayles. You remember him?”

  “Why, of course. What ever happened to the bloke?”

  Lottie said, “Last I heard, he was assaulting Wilma.”

  Lavinia barked, “Carlotta Bell, you learn some manners.”

  Wilma said, “No. It’s true. The men at the party insisted I perform a striptease. Giroux told me it was the only way to keep me out of the hospital. So I did.”

  “How humiliating,” Lavinia said.

  Wilma nodded.

  Lottie said, “Not as bad as what happened afterward. They knocked Wilma out and raped her.”

  Lavina reached out her diamond-studded fingers and covered Wilma’s hands. “My god, dear. That’s awful.”

  Wilma looked down at the sticky linoleum. For a few seconds, she lived in two times: this lunch with the Bell women, and her morning after escaping the Hitching Post.

  Lottie said, “It gets worse. The woman who runs that motor court insisted Wilma become a prostitute. Wilma has to pay her fifty bucks a week or else the madam sends some thugs over to drag Wilma back here and put her to work.”

  Lavinia squeezed Wilma’s hand even harder. “That’s positively frightful.”

  Wilma nodded.

  Lottie said, “Tell her the worst part. Tell her who owns the whorehouse. Tell her who’s pocketing all the dough you’re paying out.”

  Wilma raised her bright blue eyes and caught Lavinia’s gaze. She said, “A man named Leslie Bell.”

  Of course, Lavinia wouldn’t take Wilma’s word for it. After lunch, the three drove up to the Ventura City Hall and checked the public records. Sure enough, Leslie Bell’s ghost corporation owned the Hitching Post. Lavinia stormed out of City Hall, down the polished stone steps, and into the Cadillac. Lottie stopped Wilma at the top of the steps. “Give her a second,” she said. She pulled a couple of cigarettes out of her pewter case, handed one to Wilma, and kept one for herself. Wilma st
ruck a match on the stone wall alongside the stairs and lit both of their smokes. The two women gazed off, past the marble statue of Junípero Serra, down to the Pacific in the distance.

  Lottie tried to engage her mother in conversation a few times on the ride home. Lavinia didn’t take the bait. She lit one cigarette off the previous and blew smoke through a crack in the window and stared at the hills and farmland alongside Ventura Highway. Lottie chatted with Wilma a bit, filled her in on the latest with Chester Ellis, gossiped about some actresses she’d run into while doing film work. After a while, Lavinia’s anger filled the cab of the Cadillac. It weighed down any hope of further conversation. The best Wilma could do was pull out her ukulele and strum chords that sounded good together but didn’t add up to a song. Minor chords showed up more than was typical for Wilma, making the uke sound like a bluesy instrument, matching the mood.

  Wilma waited for Lavinia to say something, to offer to intervene between her husband and the twins, but Lavinia kept her thoughts to herself. The photograph of Leslie Bell and Ma Breedlove called out from Wilma’s purse. Wilma ignored it for as long as she could. When Lottie turned down Figueroa Street in Highland Park, Wilma knew it was time.

  “Mrs. Bell?” she said. “I hate to do this, but that madam and your husband have been gobbling up every thin dime my sister and I could hustle for the last year. The more money we earn, the more they take. It has to stop.” She dug the photo out of her purse and leaned onto the back of Lavinia’s seat. “And as bad as they’ve been to me, they’ve been worse to you.”

  She handed the photo to Lavinia. Lavinia stretched it out as far as her arms could reach and squinted at it.

  Wilma said, “That woman on top is Myrna Laurie. She’s the madam who’s been extorting me. The man on the bottom, well, you know him.”

  Lavinia handed the photo back to Wilma. She said nothing. Lottie tried to intervene. Lavinia raised a hand to stop her. Wilma stashed the photo back into her valise. She tucked away the ukulele, too. A breeze blew into the windows of the Cadillac. Lottie cruised slowly down a lane of craftsman houses. Women sat on porches, knitting. A loose chicken ran into the road. Lottie slowed to let it pass. Wilma set her goods on the backseat and waited for Lottie to drop her off.

  Lottie pulled onto the gravel driveway leading up to Wilma’s bungalow. Only then did Lavinia speak. She said, “Don’t you or your sister pay another penny, Wilma. I’ll take care of this.”

  JACK, 1946

  HAMMOND TAPPED the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm on the doorbell. Jack stood behind him and resisted the urge to tap the bell two more times and finish the riff. Gertie walked across the expansive front porch and smelled the gardenias in the teak window box. “Get a load of this place. It’s bigger than the Studio Club. How many people live here?”

  “Two,” Jack said.

  “Three,” Hammond said. He counted them on his fingers. “Bell, his wife, their butler.”

  “What about the maid?” Gertie asked. “Place like this, they’d need two or three of them.”

  “The staff live around back,” Hammond said.

  Gertie walked back to the front door. “Why does the butler get to live in the main house and everyone else has to live in the back?”

  “What am I? Bell’s fucking biographer?”

  Jack set a hand next to Hammond’s neck. His fingers dug into the soft spot between Hammond’s collar bone and the muscles that stretched from neck to shoulder. He said, “Easy, Dave.”

  A shadow appeared behind the stained-glass oak tree on the giant mahogany front door. Hammond called out, “Renny. Hammond.”

  The burly butler opened the front door. He looked straight at Jack, who still had his hand near Hammond’s neck. Jack lifted his hand off and let it hang by his side. Renny nodded toward the inside of the house. He turned and walked across the foyer. Hammond limped after him. Jack followed. Gertie drifted away from the men, running a finger along the built-in bench seat under the stairs, cutting across the room, picking up a gilded water pitcher on the foyer table, setting it back down, checking her image in a giant antique mirror above the pitcher.

  Renny turned right into a sitting room. Leslie Bell sat cross-legged in a chair near a lamp. He had a pipe in his hand and a sifter of brandy. He looked away from the approaching foursome in a forced way, as if this were a scene from a movie and he wanted to give his character a practiced nonchalance. Lavinia Bell sat in a matching club chair, hand-stitching the binding on a quilt.

  Hammond was the first to speak. He said, “Mr. Bell, maybe Mrs. Bell and Renny have an errand they can run right now.”

  Lavinia set her quilt into a woven basket next to the chair. She brushed a few errant threads off the legs of her cotton slacks as she stood. Renny didn’t move. He kept his eyes on Leslie Bell. Bell said, “You heard the man, Renny. Take the dame and dangle.”

  Gertie laughed. “Take the dame and dangle,” she repeated. “Listen to the posh boy from the mean streets of Pasadena.”

  Bell stared at Gertie through slits for eyes. “You think I’m some kind of clown, lady?”

  All eyes turned to Gertie. She fluffed the bottom of her loose, red curls with her right hand. She kept the smile on her mug and the light in her blue eyes. Either she didn’t catch the threat behind Bell’s words, or she didn’t care. Jack looked at the purse hanging from her left hand. He remembered that she’d tucked Hammond’s gun into it.

  A heavy silence hung while Bell waited for Gertie to get the message. Gertie kept smiling. Hammond hobbled a couple of steps toward her. Jack filled the space between the two. Anything Hammond did, he’d have to go through Jack to do it. Lavinia cracked the tension. “Come on, Renny,” she said. “I suppose you and I have to dangle.”

  Renny nodded and led Lavinia out of the room. Their hushed footsteps padded across the Turkish rugs, through the foyer, and out the stained-glass front door. When the door shut, Bell said, “What goes on? You got Carlotta, Chesley?”

  Carlotta? Jack had forgotten about her, forgotten he’d been hired to drag her back, forgotten that they were still spilling lines from that script.

  Gertie tossed the whole fiction out the window. “This ain’t about Lottie, and you know it. We’re here to find out what happened to my sister.”

  Bell looked at Hammond. “Who’s the kitten trying to put the screws on?”

  “It’s Gertrude Greene. Wilma Greene’s sister,” Hammond said.

  “Who’s Wilma Greene?” Bell asked.

  Hammond looked at Jack, then back at Bell. “The chippy what brings us all together.”

  Bell looked at Gertie and Jack. “And what?” he asked. “You two hinky chumps think I got something to do with your dead little dame?”

  “You got smart real quick,” Gertie said. “Two seconds ago, you don’t know who Wilma is. Now you know she’s dead without anyone saying that.”

  “Not true,” Bell said. “Hammond just said it. He just said, ‘The dead chippy what brings us all together.’”

  “He didn’t say dead,” Jack said. He was about halfsure he was right.

  Hammond hobbled back to a piano bench across the far wall. He sat down and kicked his wounded left leg in front of him. He rubbed the knee and rubbed his face. “Jackie, pour me a nip from that bar over there. I’ll put an end to this mystery.”

  HAMMOND, 1944

  HAMMOND HAD BEEN working the second shift on July 14, 1944. He ducked into the York station to grab a cup of coffee sometime around nine o’clock. While he chatted with the desk sergeant, a call came in about a hullabaloo on the two hundred block of Newland Street. Some drunk broad ran out into the street screaming. No one went out to help her. Her landlord didn’t like the noise, though, so he called the York station to get her to shut up. “I’ll run over and give it a look,” Hammond told the sergeant.

  A battered Packard was parked in the driveway of 243 Newland. Hammond recognized it. Herbert Parker, a peeper for the pictures, had been driving it around town for years. Hammond
walked past the car and into the back bungalow. As soon as he rapped on the door, he remembered the joint. He’d been there a year earlier to visit his ex-partner’s widow, Wilma. She’d claimed she’d been raped when really she’d been out whoring around. Someone filmed it. Wilma wanted the movie to be evidence.

  Hammond checked the mailbox next to the door. Wilma’s name was still on it. Only she’d dropped the Chesley and was going by Greene again.

  Hammond knew this. Wilma’s book had come out a few months earlier. She used the name Greene on that, too.

  Hammond knocked on the door and called out Wilma’s name. He could hear scuttling inside the bungalow. No one opened the door. Hammond yelled, “Wilma, I’m coming in.” He tried the knob. It was unlocked. He opened the door and flipped on the light. Wilma lay on the floor, just inside the door. Her throat was black and blue; her face drained and pale. She had vacated her bowels. Hammond had seen plenty of corpses in his day. This was one more. He didn’t have to feel for a pulse to know she was dead.

  Hammond drew his heater and called out, “There’s no back door to this bungalow. Time to come out and face the music.”

  Footsteps plodded in the bedroom. Hammond held his piece fixed on the bedroom doorway. A silhouette emerged into the light. He had his hands up. Hammond figured this to be one of the easiest murder cases in Highland Park history. Only the shadow was too big to be Parker. Even in creepers, Parker stood under five and a half feet. Something was familiar about the walk, too. The way the murderer shuffled into the light. Hammond knew he’d seen it a thousand times. He couldn’t place it. The other man stepped into the halo of living room light and things got more complex.

  The murderer was Hammond’s old pal and Wilma’s ex-father-in-law. John Chesley, Sr.

  Chesley held his hands high and said, “Hello, Dave.”

  Hammond kept the gun fixed on Chesley. “What’s going on here?”