That revelation nearly did to me what my right cross had done to Thorpe. But I came out of it faster.
“Your birth certificate say where you were born?” I asked, almost conversationally.
“Of course,” he said. “New York City.” He added proudly, “My father was a Broadway director. Richard Thorpe.”
“His name appear on the birth certificate?”
Thorpe’s stammer made a comeback. “No. He and my mother weren’t...”
“How did you find out about him?”
“Aunt Rita told me. My name was always Thorpe. She told me how I’d come by it. It was about the only time she was ever honest with me.
“She had Nola cremated, Aunt Rita did. And then scattered her ashes in the ocean. So I don’t even have a grave to visit. When I saw the TV story about mother’s slab being in Grauman’s warehouse, I knew I had to have it. I even picked out a spot down in the canyon where I was going to have it set. A place where I could plant flowers.”
“What happened to the other two slabs?”
“I told them to dump them out in the desert somewhere.”
“Told who?”
“My gardener set it up for me. He said he knew a guy who knew a guy who’d do it, but I think he just hired his relatives. I told him to take both slabs — they talked about two on the television. That way the theft wouldn’t point to me. Then, when he delivered my mother’s slab, he said there’d been three. Tried to get me to pay extra. I sent him packing.”
A fancy blue phone occupied an end table near Thorpe’s sofa. I pointed to it with the snub-nose, which I’d produced without snagging my pocket.
“Time to call him and apologize,” I said.
9.
Thorpe was able to reach his gardener friend. With my encouragement, he worked out a price for recovering the two discarded slabs and returning them to Grauman’s warehouse bright and early the next morning.
“Tell them to ring the bell this time,” I said.
I then used the blue phone to report my success to Paddy. My partial success. “It’s a no-questions-asked deal,” I said. “They’ll be getting back two of the items. Gabrielle’s and the one with the knee prints.”
“Why only two?”
“The third was damaged beyond repair.”
“I see,” Paddy said. “Well, I don’t think they’ll kick about that. I’ll be anxious to hear your full report. Anything else you want to tell me now?”
“Hold the line.” I gestured with the gun toward the front door and said to Thorpe, “You mind?”
He didn’t. He’d been a new man ever since I’d told the lie about his mother’s slab.
When he was gone, I said, “How much leverage do we have with Grauman’s?”
“Plenty,” Paddy said, “since they still want Garbo’s name kept out of this. It’s going to take two postmen to deliver our bill. Why?”
I broke open the revolver and shook the shells out onto the carpet. “This morning you mentioned doing Gabrielle a good turn.”
“Having her reinstated, you mean? Or is the word I want ‘reinstalled’? Leave it to me.”
Outside, Thorpe was staring at his Continental as if he didn’t recognize it. “Why did you say that?” he asked. “About Nola’s slab?”
“I thought she’d like you to keep it,” I said.
I was feeling altogether too soft by then. As a pick-me-up, I tossed the gun at him and told him that I’d be back if the other two slabs weren’t delivered by noon the next day.
10.
I could have gone home to mow the grass with a clear conscience. Instead, I drove north along the coast to the little town of Vesta. It was early evening when I arrived, a beautiful, still evening, the sky cloudless, the ocean a big blue pond that happened to reach all the way to Japan.
Koenig had finished her shift at the diner. She wasn’t at her boardinghouse either. No one was. I played a hunch and stopped at the little corner store to ask after the nearest public beach. On its edge, I found her. She was sitting with bowed head on a bench that was the twin of the one I’d used earlier in the day. I sat down beside her and took out my pipe.
“Who invited you?” she said, sniffing a little. She’d been crying.
“That’s a long story, Nola.”
“What did you call me?”
“Nola. As in Nola Nielsen.” I finished filling my pipe and brushed the stray bits of cavendish off my pants.
That gave my companion plenty of time to come up with a reply. The best she could do was, “I’m Rita Koenig.”
“I don’t think so. I think Koenig died in a sealed garage almost thirty years ago. I’m afraid you helped her with that.”
I got my pipe going and dropped the spent match in the sand at our feet. “Here’s how I figure it. Way back around nineteen twenty-eight, you found yourself in a bad spot. You were pregnant, and the father of the child you were carrying was a gangster named Morrie Bender. You’d already had enough of Bender, but he wasn’t ready to let you go. You knew if he found out about the kid, he might never be ready. Worse, the kid would grow up with a gangster father.
“So you ran away to New York, a town that was off-limits to Bender. You gave out the story that you were being coached for the talkies, and maybe you were. But you were really there to have the kid on the sly. You came back after a year and brought the kid with you. Set him up someplace quiet with a nurse or a nanny or both and got back to making movies. Bender had gotten over you, so everything had worked out fine.
“Then Rita Koenig, your paid-companion pal, spoiled the whole deal. She knew the truth, of course, and she threatened to go to Bender. She started bleeding you. She cut herself in for a slice of everything you’d tucked away.
“Meanwhile, Sunshine’s release was delayed. All around you, silent stars were dropping like matinée Indians. You decided that you were through anyway and that you might as well throw over the whole setup.
“So Koenig took your place in the garage. Did you dope her or get her drunk or just whack her on the head?”
Nielsen opened her purse and pulled out a twist of paper and cellophane, all that was left of the cigarettes I’d bought her. I produced a purchase I’d made when I’d stopped to ask for directions to the beach: a fresh pack of Old Golds.
She looked at the peace offering and said, “I told you this afternoon I wouldn’t talk.”
“That’s when you thought I worked for Morrie Bender.” I told her then why I’d really come to Vesta, the mystery of the missing slabs, complete in ten installments. Somewhere around episode six, she took the cigarettes and lit one gratefully.
When I’d finished, she sniffed again, collected herself, and said, “I got Rita drunk. It wasn’t very hard.”
“What about her hair? I’m guessing Koenig was a brunette, since you are now.”
“I got her to dye hers that last afternoon. That wasn’t very hard either. She’d always wanted blond hair. She’d always wanted anything I had, including Morrie Bender. I couldn’t trust her not to tell him about Peter, even with me paying her. I was afraid she’d do it just to get back in with him.”
“Did you and Koenig look that much alike?”
“Enough. And I saw to it that the body wasn’t found right away.”
“And that it was cremated. And you changed your son’s age to make it impossible for Bender to work out that he was Peter’s father. You had to get the guy who ran your trust to go along with that.”