“Do you know a woman named Helen Bryan?”
She canted her head to one side, thinking it over.
“No…no, I don’t think. Who is she?”
“His worst mistake,” Jake offered.
“My ex-wife,” I specified. “She was the one who dropped my name to Leslie. I never quite got how they were acquainted.”
“I’m sorry, but this is the first I’ve heard of her. Like I’ve said, Leslie kept me in the dark a lot over all of this. It doesn’t sound like you’re on very good terms with her, but perhaps she would be the one to ask?”
“Probably so,” I said, “but she appears to be missing.”
“What?” Jake crowed. “You didn’t tell me that, Graham.”
“Slipped my mind,” I lied. His mouth hung open. “Later,” I said.
I told Barbara that I was sorry to have bothered her so much, and she said it was no trouble, though she looked mighty troubled to me. I offered her a hug, a bit out of character for me, which she accepted. I noticed she was clutching a small, crumpled photo in her left hand. It was of Leslie Wheeler, smiling toothily and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. We had both loved and lost, I thought, but her loss was a hell of a lot worse than mine.
10
Eustace piloted a 1918 Olds, a touring car, that sputtered as though it was dying all the way from Hollywood where she collected her niece. They were heading to the Valley, where Eustace now manipulated the contraption along narrow, winding roads with gloved hands and squinted eyes.
It was the crummiest automobile Grace Baronsky had ever ridden in, an enormous step down from the Twombley back in Idaho or the car Saul sent for her every workday morning.
“It is absolutely divine to see how well you’re doing, Gracie,” Eustace hollered above the wind and the motor. “Divine. And you look terrific. Better than I’ve ever seen you. To think what a skinny child you were before I whisked you away from nowhere. A transformation. A meta — what is it?”
“Metamorphosis,” Grace said.
“You’re a butterfly,” replied her aunt.
The sun hung white and hazy, low in the sky but above the hills that surrounded the San Fernando like sentinels. Houses and bungalows were springing up all around, with filling stations and clothing boutiques and minor movie palaces to service the people who would live in them. Los Angeles never stopped spreading, growing. Grace felt like the whole of the country was spilling into the city and its environs, as if America had been upended by some great, massive god and all the people were helplessly rolling west. How many of them came in search of fame and fortune? How few were as fortunate as she, discovered within a few short years and primed to take the world by storm?
How lucky…
“Just how did you meet this Joe?” she asked, eager to disrupt her own musing.
“Joe, Joe,” Eustace sang. “Good, good Joe. The man is a prince, my child. Not too rich — not yet, anyway — but none too poor, either. And he knows everyone worth knowing. Well, everyone apart from you, of course. But aren’t we just about to change that?”
Grace smiled, barely.
“He sells pictures all over the country; to theaters that want to show them, see. A lot of them are all connected up to the studios, but there are tons that aren’t, and my Joe writes them and works it out. So if your old ma sees your picture at the Boise Century, it might very well be Joe Sommer who got it there.”
Her throat constricted slightly at the thought of her mother watching Angel of the Abyss—watching little Gracie die and come back, murder and flaunt and fornicate. It was far from the first time this waking nightmare stirred horror in her breast, but it had yet to relent in its intensity.
“Matter of fact,” her aunt continued, “I might even bet on that. You see Joe knows Mr. Veritek, dearheart. Not extraordinarily well, mind you, but Veritek is an independent and Joe says the independents represent the prepon — prepolder…”
“Preponderance.”
“Of his business, yes.”
“This one may be a tough sell in the heartland,” Grace said low.
“What’s that, Gracie?”
“Never mind. Are we nearly there? The motor is jangling my nerves.”
“Spitting distance!”
“Grand.”
The bungalow sat low and squat at the bottom of a gradually declining hill, surrounded by equally squat palms and crawling vines that struggled toward the windows. Eustace almost flooded the Olds easing the thing down to the bottom, where she guttered it and clapped her gloves together with an awkward squeal.
A stone path curved between the palms toward the front door, above which an open transom window coughed up a thin rail of pungent cigar smoke. Grace wrinkled her nose. Eustace knocked gingerly.
The man who opened the door revealed himself to be tall, a bit round around the middle, gray at the temples. He wore a thin black mustache just above his upper lip, which tightened around the end of his cigar. His eyes were gray, friendly but lingering. Grace felt blood fill her cheeks as her aunt planted a hand at the small of her back and pushed her forward.
“Mr. Sommer,” she said. “Allow me to present my niece, the picture star Grace Baron.”
“Oh, she’s not a star yet,” Joe Sommer said, spreading his lips to show short, squarish teeth. “But I reckon she will be. You can wager that.”
“A gentleman of the highest order!” Eustace declared. Joe took Grace by the hand, a bit roughly, and brushed his mouth across the back of it.
“Champagne on the lanai,” he said. “Olives and cheese. I have the cheese delivered.”
“La-nai,” Eustace mouthed to Grace.
They all went inside.
The bottle popped like a gunshot, causing Grace to flinch. Joe’s mouth stretched into a lupine grin and he laughed at her.
“Let’s see those glasses, ladies,” he said.
They sat in slat-backed chairs on a concrete patio behind the bungalow — Joe’s lanai — which was surrounded by more ratty palms and a new white fence. The sky looked like the ocean and a mild breeze picked up from the west. Eustace kicked off her shoes and giggled. Grace drank her champagne quietly.
“Saul Veritek,” Joe said at some length, his mouth full of half-chewed olives, “is a friend of mine. He may be a small fry compared to the big boys, Paramount and United Artists and what have you, but the man’s got a solid head on that flabby neck of his. You can trust me when I tell you if Saul Veritek says he’s going to make a star out of you, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
Grace’s ears burned. Her aunt tittered and shook all over, sloshing her champagne around in the glass.
“Good God, Gracie,” she said. “You’re a long way from Idaho now.”
“I suppose I trust Saul,” Grace said with some caution. “It’s Jack Parson I’m worried about. He’s missed days, you know. And when I went home the other night, he was in my place waiting for me. You’d have thought he was drunk as a lord, but he really doesn’t drink much. He’s getting a little, I don’t know…crazy.”
Joe chuckled. “I know him too, a little. That Parson thinks he’s an ar-teest. Our man Saul doesn’t have the patience for that malarkey, not when there’s money at stake — and in the picture business, money is always at stake. You want to be an artist, go paint a picture. This is industry, I always say. We’re all cogs in the machine, but my God, what a beautiful machine.”
“Alarming that he broke into your home, though,” Eustace said. “What sort of man does that?”