“Saul’s all bark,” she said.
“Some dogs bark too much.”
“Maybe it’s what got him where he is.”
“That’s just fine,” Jack said with a pained expression. “If this picture doesn’t send him back from wherever the hell he came from.”
“Gee, you’re tough on that,” Grace said. She sipped her drink and crossed her long legs. Jack noticed. “I never heard of a director hating his own movie so bad.”
“Happens all the time. First time for me, though. And anymore I don’t think of the damned thing as mine. It’s all his.” He pointed his chin at the bar, where Saul was guzzling something brown and ogling a plump brunette. “So what’s your story, anyhow? Wait — let me guess. You’re from some no-name town in the middle of the country and you came out here with an aunt, only to be discovered in a department store.”
“It was vaudeville for me, actually, but the rest is pretty close. How did you get all that?”
“It’s a very old story, Ms. Baron. I think Scheherazade knew that one.”
“I guess she knew them all,” she said with a wry smile.
“All the good stories were already told before the Lumiére brothers filmed their first frames.”
Grace raised her eyebrows and sighed. She scanned the suite, glancing at red faces hovering above starched collars and gleaming necklaces, but none of them appeared to belong to Saul. A few she recognized from pictures she had seen, though the gin worked diligently at clouding her memory. The band laid into something slow and hypnotic and she closed her eyes for a moment, taking the music in. When she reopened them, Jack was rising to his feet.
“I don’t think Saul is coming back with that drink,” she said.
“It’s just as well. I’d rather be clearheaded for tomorrow’s scenes.”
“You may be the only one.”
He ran his fingers through his thick black hair and heaved a sigh.
“Good night, Grace,” he said. “Don’t let the devils here keep you from the devils tomorrow.”
With his head down and shoulders jutting forward, Jack went past the band and melted into the sweating throng. Grace watched him disappear and downed the rest of her drink while she pondered what he’d said. Something from Shakespeare buzzed in her head, half-remembered: All the devils are here.
She squinted at the glass in her hand, then went tipsily back to the bar for a fresh one.
5
I sipped at a mug of tepid black tea prepared and given to me by Barbara Tilitson. It was bitter and needed sugar, but I didn’t say anything about it. There was a squat guy with red hair bearing down on me where I sat, his necktie crooked and shirt spotted with sweat. Said his name was Shea, and that he was a police detective. I didn’t say much to him either, because he was a policeman and I didn’t have a lawyer present. That much I told him. He said I watched too much TV.
“You’re from Boston,” he said, droning as though he was bored. I agreed that I was. “Got a couple of parking tickets for you here in Hollywood, date back to the nineties.”
“I lived here for a year. Went back home.”
“To Boston.”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“All right. Explain to me again your relationship with Ms. Wheeler.”
“There wasn’t any relationship,” I said. “I never met her, not in person. She hired me over the phone to do a job out here. I was just showing up to work when I — when Ms. Tilitson and I — found the place like this.”
“And Ms. Wheeler. Like this.”
I said, “Yeah.”
A couple of blue shirts were tiptoeing around the place, wandering from room to room like they were thinking about renting it. Poor Leslie Wheeler remained where we found her, slumped dead in her chair. In the kitchen on the other side of me Barbara paced and wrung her hands. I wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take.
“Okay,” Shea said, rubbing the back of his neck and looking annoyed. “Let me go talk to Ms. Tilitson some more. Looks to me like you just stumbled onto a real bad scene, Woodard.”
“At least I already got paid up front,” I groused.
The detective gave me a sideways look.
“That right? You gonna keep that without doing anything for it?”
“No,” I said. “I plan on doing what I came here to do, actually.”
“I doubt that very much, Mr. Woodard,” Barbara said as she shuffled slowly into the room. Her eyes were red and swollen. “The reel is gone. Whoever killed Leslie must have taken it with them.”
“Reel?” Shea squeaked. “What kind of reel?”
Barbara and I locked glances. I reached for the pack in my pants pocket.
Between the two of us, Barbara and I told the policeman as much as we knew, starting with a primer on Angel of the Abyss, a few biographical details concerning Grace Baron from me, and how Barbara and Leslie’s club got their hands on the reel. I then explained how I got roped into it, remembering along the way that I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure how I did. That was when the little redhead managed by some miracle of modern science to make my day even worse.
“We’ll want contact information for this Florence Sommer,” he said to Barbara. And then, to me: “And for your ex-wife, Mr. Woodard.”
“Do you have to drag her into this?” I whined. My voice rose a few octaves. I sounded like a petulant adolescent.
“She’s already in it, if she tipped Ms. Wheeler to your skills,” he said. “And like you said, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to bring a guy in from the East Coast to do something a hundred guys can do right here in Los Angeles.”
“She wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps,” I said. “This film really is a big hairy deal, Detective. Apart from the people in this room and a few others here in L.A., everybody else in the world thinks it’s lost — gone forever. Ms. Wheeler wanted to keep it that way for a while.”
“Awful secretive for an old movie,” he said.
Barbara snorted. “First of all, it’s not just some old movie. It’s a lost classic, a treasure. Secondly, Mr. Woodard — forgive me, Mr. Woodard — paints the thing like Leslie was trafficking in state secrets or something. It wasn’t like that at all. She just wanted to maintain control over this discovery until we had all of our ducks in a row. A thing like this will explode in a hurry, Detective Shea. You may not care much about it, but there a great many people who do. And there aren’t—weren’t—very many people with a greater knowledge of silent cinema than Leslie Wheeler.”
“I can believe people care a lot about this stuff,” the detective said sourly. “Looks a bit like Ms. Wheeler lost her life over it, doesn’t it?”
“God,” Barbara moaned. Her lips trembled and her face squashed up, palsied with anguish. “My God. Poor, poor Leslie.”
One of the blue shirts chauffeured me back to the hotel. It was just past one o’clock but I felt like I’d been awake for days, so I crawled under the sheets and tried to catch a nap. No dice. Not after what I’d seen, which was in fact the first and to date only dead body to ever cross my path. Though I’d never laid eyes on the woman, I had spoken with her and I couldn’t help but feel a great deal more involved in her death than I liked. And every time I tried closing my eyes, all I could see was her.
So I got up, withdrew another ten-dollar brew from the mini-fridge, and flipped through channels until I came to Robert Mitchum tearing up the backcountry byways in Thunder Road. I watched it to the end and stayed tuned for the follow-up, The Sundowners. I didn’t make it all the way through that one; somewhere around halfway through I crashed, hard. When I woke again, the sun was setting behind Hollywood and there was something with Irene Dunne playing on the television. I switched her off, stepped into my trousers, and dragged myself down to the street for a smoke.