She called us “girls” only when she wanted something. Olivia leaned back. “There isn’t even room for you in that dress.”
Jewell deChante could frown without wrinkling her pretty face, though time was taking care of that for her. She lifted one nostril and moved on, preferring to dine alone in our sleeping car.
“That Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps could start drafting people around here,” noted Velvet, wiping some gravy off the table with one of Jewell’s letters.
“They’d get us instead,” I told her. “She’s over age.”
“Didn’t I see Jewell come in?”
Bevis Flint was your standard hero player, with a face so square and solid it must have hurt to move it. His rock solid muscles made for great pictures at every stop: he picked up a couple of local kids on each arm. He carried two plates of gravy, one of them for Edwin Lorenzo, who strolled in behind him. This made up our usual crowd, the poker crowd. The pinochle crowd ate in the dining car.
“To change her dress, I think,” Sissy told him. “There wasn’t any room at the table, so she went to put on a different dress.”
This made no sense, but perhaps Bevis couldn’t tell. He set Edwin’s plate down and moved out of the car with his own.
“Oh yes,” said Velvet, who had been sliding over to make room for him if he was so inclined. “How sad for her that she has to sleep in the same car as the nobodies.”
“Maybe somebody can find her another place to sleep,” Olivia suggested as the door closed behind Bevis.
“Ladies, mind your innuendo. There are gentlemen in this car.”
I looked up and down the car and didn’t spot any, which I pointed out to Edwin. He raised his chin, the way he did. Edwin was a veteran of rolling voice and grandfatherly mien, generally found playing judges, congressmen, and crusty old generals. He was a very important person on this trip as well, for he carried the cards.
The battered deck hit the table, followed by two immense rolls of greenbacks. He slid a fifty from one of these, lit it from Jim’s cigarette, and then lit his own coffin nail. The money was from Props, for display purposes when we gave our little presentation on how much more valuable a stack of war bonds was. This did not make the poker played with it any less cutthroat.
The money slid back and forth while they swapped cards and we cleared away our gravy and dealt out the mail. News both profound and obscure passed between our tables, names like Rommel and Marshall mixed with Buster Wiles, Fred McEvoy, and Betty Hansen.
Bevis came back. Velvet went to chat for a minute and stayed to play some cards, though I didn’t notice that she was betting any money. Edwin got up at least once, to fetch a bottle from his private stock. Actually, I think everybody left the car at least once; maybe it was the gravy. Laszlo went out and came back six or seven times; he liked to move around to show that his supervision was required at every second.
I wasn’t really taking notes, being busy composing a fan letter to myself from a kid in Omaha. It didn’t seem important until The Child Star poked her head into the car, lifted an eyebrow, and announced, in a voice as flat as the landscape outside, “Mother hasn’t had much to drink yet, but I can’t wake her up.”
We did carry a doctor. He was insurance for the studio; kept any of us from going out before the public sniffling or sneezing, or, more likely, suffering hangovers or indigestion. Sissy ran to fetch him. The Child Star waited quietly, without much interest, at the door between the club car and her private boudoir.
The rest of us went back to our own business. Mrs. Marr, we all knew very well by now, was something of a heavy tippler. She tended to get louder as the night went on, rather than quieter, but we thought God might be on our side tonight, if He had any attention to spare from the front lines. Dr. Stone grumbled his way through our car; he had obviously been doing well at pinochle when interrupted.
“I,” said Edwin Lorenzo, “am going to sing a song.” He drained his glass and refilled it from the bottle in his vest pocket.
“Is it clean?” inquired Olivia as the door thumped shut behind Dr. Stone, with Baby Eloise following along.
“Nobody I know thinks so,” he said. He straightened his shoulders and thumped his chest a little to prepare it for exertion.
Dr. Stone came back and bent over Laszlo. Laszlo tossed his cards down and went out with him. He didn’t like Mrs. Marr any more than the rest of us. “If she’s tom up another carpet...” he muttered.
If he got into a fight with Mrs. Marr, it was a fifty-fifty proposition which one would be walking home. Mrs. Marr was mother to a star, but Laszlo was somebody’s nephew. When no shouting came from the private car, we settled back to listen to Edwin Lorenzo’s recital and pretended to blush.
He had finished his first song and was starting in on “King Caractacus” when Laszlo came back. After a whispered conversation with Jim, the two of them started for The Child Star’s car. Laszlo, though, paused at our table.
“Better have you, too.” He pointed to me and to Sissy. “You and, um, you.”
I looked to Velvet and Olivia, exchanged shrugs with them, and got up to follow.
It was a very nice car, with actual beds instead of bunks and curtains at the windows. Mrs. Marr was sprawled in a big horsehair armchair, a half-empty bottle on a low table beside her. I didn’t see a glass.
Sissy missed something else. “Where’s Baby Eloise?” she demanded.
“We sent her into the next car,” said Dr. Stone, jerking his head in that direction. “She doesn’t know yet.”
“Is Mrs. Marr really that sick?” I asked.
“Officially,” said Laszlo, “Yes.”
“Unofficially?” asked Jim.
“She’s dead,” said Dr. Stone.
We all took two giant steps back from the chair without saying, “Captain, may I?”
“Food poisoning,” growled Laszlo. “You’d think, in this weather, they could keep the food...”
Dr. Stone sat down on the nearer bed. “That can be the official story, if you like. It was less accidental poisoning, though. Somebody slipped a bottle of rubbing alcohol into her. Know where she got her liquor?”
“I wonder if she deals with the same place as Lorenzo,” mused Jim, always interested in these practical matters.
Laszlo leaned in, his hands flat on one arm of the chair. “You couldn’t have made a mistake?”
“Not after working Hollywood all through Prohibition, no.” Dr. Stone jerked a thumb at the bottle. “And unless some of the old bootleggers are back in business, to get around rationing, we can’t blame them this time. It must have been deliberate. She had plenty of drinking alcohol, too much for her to try this instead.”
Sissy’s lower lip slid out a little. “Poor Baby Eloise. What’s she going to do without her mother? You know, if it weren’t for mothers, we wouldn’t be here at all. And then who would we talk to?”
“Is The Child Star going to have to go home?” I asked.
Laszlo turned on me, glad of someone he could holler at. “Don’t you remember why she got this private car?” he demanded, shaking three fingers at me. “She’s the only one of you with crowd appeal! We need her if we’re going to finish this trip, and we’ve got to finish the trip or explain to the government, in triplicate, why we wasted their time and coal.”
“She can’t travel alone, can she?” Jim demanded.
“Of course not!” Laszlo whirled to shake fingers at him now. “That’s why I cast these two as substitute mothers!”
“I beg your pardon?” I inquired.
“Ooh!” said Sissy. “We can be mommies?”
“It sounds like one of the tougher roles we’ve been offered,” I said. “We’re still too young for the mother parts.”
“Simplest thing in the world,” Laszlo informed me. “All women have natural maternal instincts. Well, most.” He took a step back from the deceased but said no more about that. It’s a rule in our town: never speak ill of the dead... as long as there’s a chance you’ll be picked up for the murder.