Say Yes to Murder - Todhunter Ballard (book club recommendations .TXT) 📗

busy that I missed my morning Scotch,” and gave the order to the waiter. “For yourself, you look swell and clean and nice, like a stick of peppermint candy.”

He was serious. “You’ve got something, brat, that all the stars in town would give their remaining teeth for. Stay that way. I wish you hadn’t had that chance to take over that Hollywood column. This place does things to people if they stay too long. It kills your perspective. It makes you live on excitement, waiting for things that never happen.”

She said. “You’re bitter, Bill, and once you were nice.” There was sadness in her voice and shadows in the brown eyes which came up to meet his gray ones. But after a moment, she seemed to shake off the mood. She was flippant and very gay.

She said, “And what’s worrying you this morning, chum? Don’t tell me that Spurck has lost his toupee and that you can’t find it?”

He said, “It isn’t Spurck. It’s Kitty Foster.”

Nancy Hobbs did not like Kitty Foster, but she would rather have died than let Lennox see. “Has Kitty taken you back, my sweet?”

He said: “Lay off. I’m trying to think. I can’t when you chatter.”

She was silent with no sign of resentment. He broke a piece of French bread and chewed it savagely. “If we don’t find Heyworth we can bury Spurck.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed with distrust. “What is this, a publicity gag?”

He wasn’t pleased as, he usually was when the incident was mentioned. “I’m out of the publicity racket, sweet, and you know it. This picture is so near done that Spurck’s already counting the gross. But we can’t finish it without Heyworth. I’ve got to find him and sleep with him until it’s done. The chances I take with my honor!”

She said seriously: “Chuck it! Pull loose, Bill. You used to be a decent pal. Now you’re not much better than any of the rest of these two-timing mugs. Shove off for New York. Write that book you, were starting the night I first met you. Remember—five years ago?—Chicago…”

For a full minute he was silent, then he reached across and patted the back of her hand. “Sorry, brat, but it won’t work. I’ve got to find Heyworth and help get this picture finished. After that I’ll think about it.”

She sighed, knowing she had lost. She didn’t like the cynical lines etched around his mouth. She didn’t like the nervous not-enough-sleep look shading the brightness of his eyes. “You don’t even get your hair cut often enough now. What do I have to do? Play mother at my age?”

He watched her with the air of one humoring an indulged child. “All right. Here’s a quiz question for you. How well do you know your Hollywood, Miss Hobbs? Do you know a dancer with a foreign education and the habit of quoting Chaucer in her cups is making a play for one of our leading men? What is the name of the dancer, and where the hell is Leon Heyworth?”

Her eyes widened. “You aren’t by any chance talking about Jean Jeffries, are you? She’s the only one in this village who knows that Chaucer isn’t a kind of cheese.”

“I am,” he admitted. “It seems that she moved in on a twosome at the Beverly Derby last night, neatly cut Kitty Foster out of the picture, and disappeared with Heyworth under her wing.”

Nancy Hobbs said flatly: “I don’t believe it. She’s a little cracked—who isn’t—but O. K. otherwise. Heyworth is nothing but a worn-out stud. Her grandmother isn’t going to like it a bit.”

“Grandmother?” Lennox looked blank.

Nancy Hobbs mocked him. “And I thought you knew your Hollywood. Jean Jeffries is Mary Morris’ granddaughter. The old lady sent her to France. I think she intended to make a scholar out of her. It didn’t work that way. For all her culture, the little gal had itchy feet. When you’re born to dance you dance, even if your education crops out when you’re drunk.”

Lennox was frowning into his coffee cup. He liked Mary Morria. At sixty-five she was the best box-office attraction since Valentino. She’d been good a long time. He could remember her twenty years ago when, as a kid, he had sat high in the gallery of a Midwestern theater, sat and watched and worshiped.

No. Mary Morris would not approve of her granddaughter playing with Heyworth, and if Bill knew the old lady she would definitely do something about it.

He said: “This makes it swell,” and he sounded even more tired than when he had first come in. “This town can be beautifully dirty, honey—so full of heartbreak and sin.”

The girl told him: “They aren’t synonymous. Me, I like a little clean sin, but you can have the heartbreak.”

He pushed back the chair and rose, picking up the checks. “That’s the hell of it. I’m usually up to my neck in heartbreak—other people’s. I’d like to have time for a few troubles of my own.” He waited for her to rise, and then moved toward the exit.

4.

William Lennox paid off his taxi and looked at the apartment house. Either Jean Jeffries was a better dancer than he had supposed or someone was helping with the rent. He was not as a rule dirty-minded, and he much preferred to think that the help came from the girl’s grandmother.

He wanted desperately to give Jean Jeffries a break, not that he gave a damn about her, but to him anyone connected with Mary Morris should have feet without too much clay on them.

The building was one of those intimate places without a desk or lobby. The lack of both did not mean that the house was inexpensive. On the contrary, it was exceedingly high-priced, but desk clerks could be embarrassing for tenants who liked to entertain at odd hours, and rumor said that the management catered to that type of tenant.

Jean’s residence there did not lessen the suspicion which was already forcing its way into his unwilling mind. Mary Morris’ granddaughter certainly had no business in such a place. It should have been reserved for the glamour girls who were still climbing up the ladder and who had not as yet reached the dignity of a home in Holmby Hills.

He was not naive enough to press the small black button opposite her mailbox. If Heyworth was still above stairs there would be no answer to the bell. The outer door was locked and he paused on the sidewalk, wondering how to get in.

This problem was settled for him as a woman crossed the small entrance and pushed open the ground glass door. She was blond, with the enameled finish of Max Factor and the House of Westmore, neatly turned out. She gave Lennox a speculative look, but he was too busy catching the door to give her more than a passing glance.

The entry was small and tiled. An automatic elevator and a stairway which looped like a climbing snake around the cage offered a choice. He chose the elevator and rode upward in the little car with a faint accompanying sense of claustrophobia.

The girl who opened the door was small and very dark. It startled him. He was so used to blondes. She said: “Yes?” impatiently, as if she dared him to give a good excuse for knocking on the door.

She wore a flowered housecoat with a long zipper up the front, and from the way the coat fitted he judged that there could be little underneath.

“I’m Lennox,” he said, “from General-Consolidated. I want to talk to you.”

He read the hesitation in her dark eyes, the careful way in which she measured him. “I… Yes…”

“May I come in?” He suited his action to the words and stepped partly into the entry.

She moved back a little. It was obvious that she did not want him there, but now that he was inside she surrendered.

The apartment was better than he had expected—a long living room done in white and gold with an imitation fireplace at one end. It had the professional look which all furnished apartments bear, as if the fixtures had been selected for renting purposes, not for comfort.

The girl was a stiff black exclamation point beside the door, unbending, unyielding, in every line of her slim dancer’s body.

“You wanted to see me? Why?”

He turned around, found a loose cigarette in his pocket, and rolled it with little nervous gestures of his fingers. Bluntly he told her: “I want Heyworth.”

Their eyes locked. She told him: “Heyworth is no business of yours.”

A twisted, flitting smile lighted the tenseness of his face. “That, honey, is where you’re wrong. For my sins, Heyworth is decidedly my business. I’ve got to find him and but quick.”

“Not here,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. If Kitty told you…”

His words knifed at her. “And why should Kitty Foster have told me anything?”

She looked her surprise. “Because Kitty is the only one who could think that he might be here. She has an evil mind.”

“Dirty,” Lennox corrected. “Where is he?”

The dancer shook her head. “I don’t know. He brought me home and left.”

“And left his car parked around the corner in the side street?” He was suddenly serious. “Listen, kid. I don’t like this job. I don’t care to play nursemaid to a dressed-up rat, and your morals are your own affair, but Heyworth is needed at the studio. I’ve come to get him, and I’m not going to leave until I do.”

He raised his voice so that it would carry to the other rooms of the apartment. “Come on out, Leon, and save us both trouble.”

There was no answer, no movement of any kind within the white walls.

The girl was motionless, her eyes steady on his face. “You see, he isn’t here. Will you go now, please?”

He hesitated. She looked so damned young. He knew he was a sucker for that look. And there was Mary Morris to consider. He cleared his throat and felt his ears redden from embarrassment. “I should turn my collar around before I start the lecture,” he told her. “But Heyworth is a rat—the heir to a long line of rats.”

She flashed at him: “I can take care of myself.”

“A million girls should have those lines carved on their tombstones. You’re talking nonsense and you know it. You’re no wide-eyed lass from the tall corn country. A friend of mine spent dough to educate you, to make you something a lot of other kids would like to be. So what? So you toss it in the gutter and climb in after it.”

She came across the room. She moved with such slow deliberateness that he did not know what was in her mind until she slapped him. The blow was not a token thing. Each finger left its individual mark upon his cheek.

“You’re rotten.” Her voice was so choked the words did not come clearly. “Get out. Get out. Quick!”

He didn’t move. She was the second woman who had ordered him out that day, and both were tied to Heyworth. He wondered as he stared at her what it was the leading man had.

He caught her wrist before she could strike again. “That’s enough of that.” He forced her hand down to her side, and after a second the fight went out of her.

They stood there close together, and he was very conscious of her, so conscious that he dropped her wrist.

His voice was a little rough when he said: “All right. Trot him out.”

“He isn’t here.” Her black eyes were level, without waver, and he almost believed her.

“I’ll have a look,” he said, and turned