We exchanged raised eyebrow stares. I am one year older than Sissy myself, which I assumed Lorenzo knew.
“Do you play the filthy game yourself?” he went on.
“Poker?” I said. “A little. Bridge is my sport.”
He shrugged. “A pity. If Laszlo is too busy controlling rumors, I’ll have to find one of the others to take his place. Not your Allotment Annie, however, I am far too old for the stakes she prefers.”
“Last night,” I said, “do you remember seeing anyone...”
“One moment.” He extended a hand to George’s sleeve as the conductor came down the aisle. “Have you seen any likely-looking cardplayers awake yet, my good man?”
George was nobody’s good man. He paused long enough for a grunt and a growl and moved on. “I wouldn’t wear that uniform sixteen hours a day if it chafed that much,” Lorenzo noted.
Doors slammed simultaneously at opposite ends of the car. George was on his way out and Jewell deChante was on her way through. I gave way before her glower and looked down the aisle, avoiding her venomous glare. I was able to see Olivia stride in and throw herself into a seat.
“I’ll go find out if Olivia’s dying to lose play money to you cutthroats,” I said as Jewell banged the exit open.
I’d lost interest in questioning Lorenzo. I couldn’t see him doing The Child Star any favors. He had too little in the way of energy to bother, and too much in the way of brains to leave his own bottle behind if he had. In fact, he had conjured up an unpleasant alternate theory. Someone — I was thinking of Velvet — could have used his bottle for the alcohol so the crime would be pinned on him, in revenge for some insult.
“How did you do?” I asked Olivia.
One corner of her mouth jerked up. “I’m still alive. I must have done all right.”
Being alive seemed awfully significant just now. “Why? You think she did it?”
“I do not.” Her nose wrinkled, as if invaded by a foul odor. “She could poison someone just by kissing ’em.”
“Got a hangover this morning, does she?”
“That woman is a hangover.” Olivia shrugged. “I didn’t ask her any questions, if that’s what you wanted to know. I’m losing interest in playing cops and robbers. Whoever bumped off Mrs. Marr did a favor, and if there’s a chance he’ll come back for the Queen of the Screen, I don’t want to get in his way.”
I tipped my head toward the far door. “She going back to the sleeper?”
“That’s her private dining car, isn’t it?”
As ranking actress, Jewell always shooed the rest of us out so she could dine in the sleeping car undistracted by underlings. We didn’t linger there anyhow; our spot was in the club car, among the bags of bogus mail.
I set off for Jewell’s boudoir, telling Lorenzo as I passed, “Keep your cards warm. I may find somebody yet.”
The Child’s Star’s car had to be passed through first. I nearly banged into George as he hauled red, white, and blue bunting to be tacked into strategic places before we made our stop. At the door to my new bedroom, I paused to peek inside. The Child Star was still occupied with her game of solitaire; Sissy and Bevis were both trying to interest her in their drawings of bunnies. Velvet glanced back at the door and glared to see me. I ducked down the corridor and bounced across the platform to my former sleeping spot.
Jewell was sitting on Velvet’s bed, scowling at breakfast. I cannot swear that this made it curdle faster. With a sigh, she set it aside and picked up a well-thumbed volume of New Yorker cartoons.
She didn’t look up as I let the door shut behind me. “Morning,” I said.
Her eyes lit up as they lit on me, and her pearlies parted. “Become lost,” she enunciated.
Jewel and I had never been great buddies. In her first lead, in Wagons to the Ivy League, I was a funloving college girl who kicked her so she fell down. I put a little extra feeling into this on one take. She landed so perfectly asprawl, so open-mouthed with surprise, that the director not only kept it in but had us do it over four times for the still cameras. The stills made all the major magazines and did a lot for Jewell’s visibility. All she remembered me for, though, was the kick.
Aside from some growling now and then, however, we’d gotten along so far, at least when I remembered to recognize her superior status. So I stopped at a respectful distance and said, “You didn’t get to tell us what you wanted to about the letters yesterday.”
She tossed the book up to the pillow on the bunk and pulled one leg up next to her. “Forget it.” She tossed her head back. “There probably won’t be any room now for my letters, with all the ones you’ll be getting.”
She put so much venom behind “you’ll” that I took a step back. Who’d she been talking to, and what did she know that I didn’t?
One hand pulled the ankle on the bed closer to her. “Not that it matters. As if it mattered to me how many phony letters everybody gets. That brat’s the only one who gets real letters, and the company has a spy to make sure Mrs. Marr doesn’t write those herself, checking every letter that reaches the train.”
She really did have inside information, or else she was as stuck on the idea of spies as Jim was. “Who...”
The ankle was jerked even closer. I could see the deep imprints of her fingers in it. “I know what it is. I wouldn’t go with T. K. on that trip to Miami. So they told Laszlo to be sure everybody else got the attention on this trip. First it was the brat; now it’s you two guys. That’s what it is. I’d’ve got that room, but Laszlo had orders.”
I blinked. “Orders to move us into the vacant space if somebody was murdered?”
If looks could kill, it would have been all holiday with me. Since I didn’t drop, she snarled. “They’ll be giving my parts to just anybody next, anybody who’s handy, just to keep me out. I’m going to be eased away from the spotlight. That’s why they put me in Five Star with that B-movie director. This is just the next stage. Laszlo and Lorenzo are in on it together: they’d get rid of Mrs. Marr and then push you two into the spotlight so there won’t be room for me.”
She tossed her head again. “At least it took two of you to replace me. I’ll have to remember that when I’m playing the heroine’s grandmother.”
I doubted that her recent decline was caused by any studio plots, but I also doubted that saying so was going to get me I anywhere. Sympathy was more the line to take.
“Why, I had no idea!” I rolled my hands together to signify mental anguish. “I surely wouldn’t want to be a part of that.”
She sneered.
“Honest,” I said. “Laszlo doesn’t have the brains for anything like that. It’s sure to come out, and then it’ll look as if I was in on it from the start. But if you could prove everything you know, and go to the police with it...”
“The studio would toss me out on my can, and I’d never even play the heroine’s grandmother,” she told me.
“No, no,” I said. “If you can get good, solid proof — the way you did in A Fine Funeral, they’ll cut off Laszlo completely. They’ve been wanting to get rid of him forever. Think how grateful they’ll be!”
It would have taken a better actress than I am to make her buy this, but it did switch her train of thought to another track. “Maybe I could. And if I can prove T. K. and J. W. and the others were in on it, maybe the whole studio goes bust and I’ll get out of my contract. After all that publicity, all the big studios will want me.”
I had my doubts, but I didn’t let those show. “I just know you can do it! And if you need any help, remember I’m right behind you to give you a boost.”
My dialogue needed work. Her head snapped around. “You mean like in Wagons to the Ivy League?” She snatched up something and hurled it.