I pulled into the driveway of Lissa Wellman’s house just as a silvery Lexus SUV started to back out. The woman driving it stopped, leaned out of the window, and looked back at me. Her hair in the sunlight was a rich coppery color found nowhere in nature, and bright enough to make me wince.
I got out and walked up to the driver’s door. The woman at the wheel wore big sunglasses that emphasized bold cheekbones and a jaw that was surprisingly square in a face so feminine. She was wearing the kind of makeup that was designed for the old Technicolor process-vivid, expert, and none too subtle.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Are you going to rob me?”
“Not today, Miss Wellman. I need to talk to you about Thistle.”
“I don’t talk to the press,” she said. “Especially not about Thistle.”
“I’m a friend of hers. She’s disappeared.”
She shook her head slowly. “Oh, my. Still, that’s more or less the story, isn’t it? She’s been trying to disappear for years.”
“Well, there’s some question, in my mind at least, as to whether she disappeared on her own this time, or whether it was someone else’s idea.”
Lissa Wellman let out a sigh. “I hate to hear that, but I haven’t seen her.”
“I didn’t think you had. I’m just hoping for information. Something that might tell me where to look.”
She glanced in her rear-view mirror. “Move your car so I can get out, and come with me,” she said. “I’m on my way to see Henry.” She put the car back into reverse and said, “But we can talk in front of Henry with no problem. Henry’s dead.”
“My husband,” Lissa Wellman said, carefully negotiating a curve. She drove as though a fortune-teller had warned her about the day. “Nicest man I ever knew. Not necessarily the most exciting or the most amusing-actually, Paul Lynde was probably the most amusing-but Henry was nice all the way to his bone marrow. Niceness goes a long way.”
“It’s got staying power, too,” I said.
“You know something about it, don’t you? I’m afraid that puts you in the minority. It seems to me to be getting rarer and rarer. We value other things now. Intelligence, I guess, or wit, or the ability to stay half an hour ahead of what everyone else is thinking or doing. Or even wearing. But I’ll take niceness. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. In a small town, it’s important to be nice because you see the same people every day. In LA, you can be all kinds of awful because people generally only go by once. I read somewhere that the act that tells you most about someone is how they look at themselves in a mirror, but I’d say it’s how nice they are to someone they know they’ll never see again.”
“How long were you and Henry married?”
“We’re still married. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean we’re not married. But we were married in the flesh, so to speak, for thirty-three years.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing much. Oh, he worked when I was getting started. Sold real estate. But then I began to make some money, and he decided to take care of me. He took what I made and invested it in property and built it all into a very tidy little empire, which he called LissaLand. Apartment houses and regular houses and acreage up north, some kind of shopping mall, and, oh, I don’t know, all sorts of places I never even saw. But they all brought in money every month. And a week after he died, I sold all of it, every square foot. I didn’t want to be a landlord, have all those people’s lives in my hands.” She turned on the indicator for a left. “So here I am, old, previously famous, and rich.”
“Not all that old,” I said.
“Keep it up, dear,” she said. “You’re doing very well for someone who’s not in show business.” The left led us up a gentle hill, and then under an archway, heavy with climbing roses, that said ROSEHAVEN on a large metal plaque.
“By genetic standards,” she said, “I don’t suppose I’m very old. And the women in my family have always gone on just forever, I mean we continually live almost a century. But even if I disregard your flattery, there was no reason to expect I’d ever be famous, much less rich. The nicest thing anyone ever wrote about me was that I had a ‘modest but congenial talent.’ ” She shook her head, and the orange hair grabbed at the sunlight. “And he meant it as a compliment. But an angel took a hand and made me rich and semi-famous, and you know who she was.”
“I do. And I know that she thinks your talent was something special.”
“Really. How do you know that?”
“This is embarrassing to admit, but I had to read her journals to figure out where she might be. She said you had a light in your center, and that’s what the camera saw. She was just reflective, she said, but you were a lighthouse.”
“That poor child. If I was a lighthouse, I did a rotten job of keeping her from hitting the rocks.”
Lissa guided the car along a narrow road that took us between banks of roses, not so much a formal garden as an almost impromptu arrangement of beds, all different sizes and shapes, with lawn stretching like green aisles between them. Here and there a stone bench sprouted, a double bench, actually, with seats facing in both directions and sharing a single backrest between them. Then a high wall appeared in front of us, nothing fancy, just rough, weathered redwood, grayed by exposure to the elements and absolutely perfect for the site. Lissa pulled around it, and I saw half a dozen parking spaces.
“This is beautiful,” I said.
“Isn’t it.” She undid her seat belt and got out of the car. “Like a lot of the good things in my life, it came from ‘Once a Witch.’ ” We were walking by now, heading back around the wall toward the roses. “Years ago, back in the 1980s, I had a part in another sitcom, ‘In the Family Way.’ You don’t have to pretend to remember me. I played the next-door neighbor, and I had brown hair and nothing but straight lines. We had this darling makeup man, Buddy Mendoza, who’d been forever with his friend Charles. Charles was an agent who’d done very well, and he and Buddy were just rolling in money. I once asked Buddy why he continued to work, and he said, ‘All my life I’ve been playing with makeup, Lissa, so why would I stop now?’ ”
She led me along a strip of meticulously mowed grass between beds of roses that stood four and five feet high, most of them in full bloom. The air was thick with scent, and I could hear the lazy drone of bees. “Anyway, during our second season on ‘Family Way,’ Charles died. When Buddy read his will, it turned out that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes placed in a hole and have a rose bush-he specified a damask rose, one of the very old varieties-planted on top of him, so he could supply nitrogen to the flowers. He’d bought a few acres up here but he and Buddy had never built on it. We go right, here.”
I followed her as she turned. The green path we were now taking led to a circle of roses perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with a smaller circle of grass in the center. “So Buddy brought Charles’s ashes up here and did what Charles had wanted, and that rose just exploded. You could practically see it grow. This was the time, I’m sure you’ll remember, when men like Buddy and Charles were dying by the dozen every day. And Buddy had brought some of his friends up here when he planted Charles’s rose. The idea sort of took hold in their hearts.”
We entered the circle of roses. At the center was a round bench, and Lissa sat down and indicated a rosebush, not very tall but profusely adorned with blooms of a red so dark it was almost black. There was a small pewter plaque in front of it that said Henry Wellman. “There he is,” she said. “My Henry. He chose the rose, which is called ‘Othello,’ because of its color, thank you, not as a comment on our marriage, which was mostly free of jealousy. By the time Henry passed on, there were almost fifty people buried up here, mostly gay men, but not all of them, and Buddy was fighting tooth and nail with the city, which wanted to close the place down. Anything new, anything beautiful, just brings out the worst in bureaucrats. By that time, I was rich from ‘Once a Witch’ and Henry’s real estate, and I bought all the property on both sides and hired lawyers. It took a bunch of lawsuits and newspaper stories and some stuff on television, but the little gray men eventually went away. The funny thing is that two of the men who fought the hardest to stop Buddy have their own roses here now.”