She was dressed all in white — white hat with a wide, schoolgirl brim; white dress, fitted enough to make her body beckon him further; white shoes with high, spiked heels.
But it was more than the way she dressed and the way she stood. There was something strange about her, almost mysterious, and mystery didn’t go well in the grease-and-grime society of Wagner’s Garage. Leo got to his feet.
Carl Wagner, who was half again Leo’s thirty years, and far more interested in the motor he’d uncovered than in any woman, blocked the view of her face. But her voice, when she spoke, was soft and resonant.
“Mr. Wagner,” she said, “can you tell me when my automobile will be ready?”
Automobile — not car. Leo’s active mind took note.
By this time Wagner was peering under the hood with the enthusiasm of a picnicker who had just opened a boxed banquet.
“It’s a big motor, Miss Revere,” he answered, “and every cylinder has to be synchronized. Your father’s always been very particular about that.”
“My father—” She hesitated. There was the ghost of a smile. It couldn’t be seen, but it was felt — the way some perfumes, Leo reflected, are felt. “My father is very particular, Mr. Wagner. But it’s such a warm day, and I don’t feel like shopping.”
Carl Wagner wasted neither words nor time. The fingers of one hand went poking into the pocket of his coveralls and dug up a set of keys at the same instant that he glanced up and saw Leo.
“My helper will take you home,” he said. “You can tell your father that we’ll deliver the car just as soon as it’s ready.”
If Leo Manfred had believed in fate, he would have thought this was it; but Leo believed in Leo Manfred and a thing called opportunity.
Women were Leo’s specialty. He possessed a small black book containing the telephone numbers of more than 57 varieties; but no one listed in his book was anything like the passenger who occupied the back seat of the boss’s new Pontiac as it nosed up into the hills above the boulevard.
Leo tried to catch her face in the rear-view mirror. She never looked at him. She stared out of the window or fussed with her purse. Her face was always half lost beneath the shadow of the hat. She seemed shy, and shyness was a refreshing challenge.
At her direction, the Pontiac wound higher and higher, beyond one new real estate development after another, until, at the crest of a long private driveway, it came to a stop at the entrance of a huge house. Architecturally, the house was a combination of Mediterranean and late Moorish, with several touches of early Hollywood. Not being architecturally inclined, Leo didn’t recognize this; but he did recognize that it must have cost a pretty penny when it was built, and that the gardener toiling over a pasture-sized lawn couldn’t have been supplied by the Department of Parks and Beaches.
And yet, there was a shabbiness about the place — a kind of weariness, a kind of nostalgia, that struck home as Leo escorted his passenger to the door.
“I know this house!” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen pictures of it. It has a name—” And then he stared at the woman in white, who had been given a name by Carl Wagner. “Revere,” he remembered aloud. “Gordon Revere.”
“Gavin Revere,” she corrected.
“Gavin Revere,” Leo repeated. “That’s it! This is the house that the big film director Gavin Revere built for his bride, Monica Parrish. It’s called—”
The woman in white had taken a key out of her purse.
“Mon-Vere,” she said.
Leo watched her insert the key into the lock of the massive door and then, suddenly, the answer to the mystery broke over him.
“If you’re Miss Revere,” he said, “then you must be the daughter of Monica Parrish. No wonder I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”
“Couldn’t you?”
She turned toward him, briefly, before entering the house. Out of her purse she took a dollar bill and offered it; but Leo had glimpsed more than a stretch of long, drab hall behind her. Much more.
“I couldn’t take money,” he protested, “not from you. Your mother was an idol of mine. I used to beg dimes from my uncle — I was an orphan — to go to the movies whenever a Monica Parrish was playing.”
Leo allowed a note of reverence to creep into his voice.
“When you were a very small boy, I suppose,” Miss Revere said.
“Eleven or twelve,” Leo answered. “I never missed a film your mother and father made—”
The door closed before Leo could say more; and the last thing he saw was that almost smile under the shadow of the hat.
Back at the garage, Carl Wagner had questions to answer.
“Why didn’t you tell me who she was?” Leo demanded. “You knew.”
Wagner knew motors. The singing cylinders of the Duesenberg were to him what a paycheck and a beautiful woman, in the order named, were to Leo Manfred. He pulled his head out from under the raised hood and reminisced dreamily.
“I remember the first time Gavin Revere drove this car in for an oil change,” he mused. “It was three weeks old, and not one more scratch on it now than there was then.”
“What ever happened to him?” Leo persisted.
“Polo,” Wagner said. “There was a time when everybody who was anybody had to play polo. Revere wasn’t made for it. Cracked his spine and ended up in a wheel chair. He was in and out of hospitals for a couple of years before he tried a comeback. By that time everything had changed. He made a couple of flops and retired.”
“And Monica Parrish?”
“Like Siamese twins,” Wagner said. “Their careers were tied together. Revere went down, Parrish went down. I think she finally got a divorce and married a Count Somebody — or maybe she was the one who went into that Hindu religion. What does it matter? Stars rise and stars fall, Leo, but a good motor...”
Twelve cylinders of delight for Carl Wagner; but for Leo Manfred a sweet thought growing in the fertile soil of his rich, black mind.
“I’ll take the car back when it’s ready,” he said.
And then Wagner gave him one long stare and a piece of advice that wasn’t going to be heeded.
“Leo,” he said, “stick to those numbers in your little black book.”
For a man like Leo Manfred, time was short. He had a long way to travel to get where he wanted to go, and no qualms about the means of transportation. When he drove the Duesenberg up into the hills, he observed more carefully the new developments along the way. The hills were being whittled down, leveled off, terraced and turned into neat pocket-estates as fast as the tractors could make new roads and the trucks haul away surplus dirt. Each estate sold for $25,000 to $35,000, exclusive of buildings, and he would have needed an adding machine to calculate how much the vast grounds of Mon-Vere would bring on the open market.
As for the house itself — he considered that as he nosed the machine up the steep driveway. It might have some value as a museum or a landmark — Mon-Vere Estates, with the famous old house in the center. But who cared about relics any more? Raze the house and there would be room for more estates. It didn’t occur to Leo that he might be premature in his thinking.
He had showered and changed into his new imported sports shirt; he was wearing his narrowest trousers, and had carefully groomed his mop of near-black hair. He was, as the rear-view mirror reassured him, a handsome devil, and the daughter of Gavin Revere, in spite of a somewhat ethereal quality, was a woman — and unless all his instincts, which were usually sound, had failed him, a lonely woman. Celebrities reared their children carefully, as if they might be contaminated by the common herd, which made them all the more susceptible to anyone with nerve and vitality.
When Leo rang the bell of the old house, it was the woman in white who answered the door, smiling graciously and holding out her hand for the keys. Leo had other plans. Wagner insisted that the car be in perfect order, he told her. She would have to take a test drive around the grounds. His job was at stake — he might get fired if he didn’t obey the boss’s orders.