His nose must have twitched, because she said, “She tries to fool me by flushing the butts down the toilet, but the place always smells like a smoking car. I think she bribes the nasty kid downstairs to smuggle them in. He probably shoplifts them.”
“I might have met him.”
“That explains why you’re late. Some day he’s going to try that button trick on Miss Peters and get a tongue-lashing to make him wish she’d used a paddle. She has an impressive vocabulary.”
“No wonder she likes Carole Lombard. They say she had her brothers teach her every curse word they knew, to put her on level ground with every man she dealt with. They called her the Profane Angel.”
“Jane told me that; and many other stories as well. I’ll have to rent a Lombard film sometime. Anyone whose escapades can make a trained nurse blush is worth checking out.”
“You haven’t seen A Perfect Crime?” He had a sinking feeling he’d been lured there under false pretenses.
“No projection equipment here. But she tells me I’m not missing much. ‘Child actors should be drowned, like kittens.’ That’s a quote.”
She excused herself to knock on a door across from the entrance. “Mr. Valentino’s here.” After a muffled invitation she opened the door and held it for him. As he stepped past, she lowered her voice. “Find out where she hides the cigarettes.”
When the door closed behind him, he was in a large bedroom done in white and gold. There was a white four-poster bed, neatly made, a dresser and vanity table, and a sitting area made up of two reproduction Louis XIV chairs and a chaise, all upholstered in Cloth of Gold. Plastic prescription containers and over-the-counter pill bottles took up every horizontal space except one: Valentino’s practiced eye went immediately to four flat aluminum film cans stacked on the vanity table.
“You look like a Valentino. Family resemblance, or plastic surgery?”
The tobacco-roughened voice came from a very old, very plump woman seated in one of the chairs. She wore a red sweater that made her look like a tomato, blue sweatpants with sharp creases, and thick socks in heelless slippers. Her hair was shorn to a white haze on her scalp. She had blue eyes.
“Neither,” Valentino said. “There might be some relation way back; not enough to inherit.”
“He didn’t have much to leave. His career was on the skids when he died at thirty-one. ‘Good career move,’ someone said. It was the same with Lombard. She hadn’t made a movie worth shouting about in years when that plane cracked up. She was mostly famous as Mrs. Clark Gable.”
“So much for breaking the ice.”
“I’m ninety-eight. I can’t wait for it to melt on its own. Sit down.”
As he lowered himself into the chair facing hers, she took the top off a fat pill bottle and drew out a filterless cigarette. A smaller container yielded a slim throwaway lighter. “If you tell Field Marshal von Voss about my stash, the deal’s off.” She blew twin jets of smoke out her nostrils.
“Trying to keep you healthy doesn’t make her a Nazi.”
“I gave up two breasts for the privilege years ago. Fortunately, they weren’t much to begin with. It was practically out-patient surgery.”
He laughed, more in response to the wicked gleam in her eye than to the black humor. His work put him in frequent contact with senior citizens, veterans of the Golden Age, and he found them more entertaining company than most of his own generation. “How did you come into possession of A Perfect Crime?”
“It was no feat. They hadn’t invented re-releasing back then, no TV or video markets, so no one gave them any thought after the first run. But you know that. If the studios had kept better track of the inventory, we’d be up to our butts in celluloid and you’d be out of a job.”
“Were you in the industry?”
“I came out here when I was eight years old. It wasn’t an industry then. But it was the only factory in town, and if you wanted to work, that’s where you went.”
He excused himself and got up to look at the film cans. A Perfect Crime was stenciled on the lid of the one on top, with the year and production number. It looked genuine, but he’d been fooled before. “Silver nitrate?”
“No. I had it transferred to safety stock before you were born. I burned the original negative before it burned me. That stuff’s worse than nitroglycerine.”
“Were you a technician?”
“I could’ve joined the union if I’d wanted. I always got on with all my crews. They like to talk about their work, like everyone else.”
He went back and sat down. Time had done its work on her face and figure, but essential beauty leaves a glowing memory, stubborn as embers clustered here and there. “Were you an actress?”
She laughed, coughing smoke, and deposited the smoldering stub in a water glass. It spat and died in the inch of liquid in the bottom. “The critics didn’t all agree on that. I used to be Carole Lombard.”
He was silent long enough for her to fish out a fresh cancer stick and set fire to it.
“Jane Peters,” he said. “Lombard’s real name was Jane Alice Peters. I didn’t make the connection.”
“I was still fooling with it until I was almost thirty, when I made it legal. I was Carol without the e until Fast and Loose; my twenty-eighth, for hell’s sake, counting the Sennett shorts. Spelling mistake in the credits. That e made me a star.”
He almost said, It wasn’t that that made you a star, then remembered she was a fraud or delusional. “Lombard’s been dead more than sixty years. Even you said so.”
“I said her plane cracked up. I didn’t say she was in it. I mean I. I’ve been talking about myself in the third person so long I sometimes get to thinking I’m somebody else.”
“Her remains were found on the scene, along with the pilot and all the other passengers. One of them was her mother.”
“I never got over that.” She used the little finger of the hand holding the cigarette to sop a tear from the corner of one eye. “She was my buddy. Pa was nuts about her. Gable, I mean. We called each other Ma and Pa, not Carole and Clark. Sounds like an advertising agency.” She took a long, shuddering drag and seemed to collect herself. “They found some wisps of blond hair and a mass of pulp in a section of fuselage squashed into a block ten feet long. It wasn’t me. I gave up my seat to an army nurse when we landed in Albuquerque to refuel. I told Mom to stay aboard and tell Pa I’d be along later by train. I said it was my patriotic duty, but what I really wanted was to drive him so batty he’d take me right there in the station. We were always pulling pranks like that on each other.”
Valentino said nothing. He’d encountered cases of Alzheimer’s and senile dementia often enough to know better than to upset the afflicted party by contradicting her.
“I scrubbed off my makeup and tied a scarf around my hair before I boarded the train in Albuquerque,” she said. “I was tired of signing autographs and grinning at fans. I found out about the crash when we stopped in Flagstaff, where the newsboys were shouting. ‘Carole Lombard Dead,’ that knocked all the tired out of me. I got out and bought a paper. I didn’t make it through the first paragraph before I fainted.
“I woke up in a doctor’s office. He told me I was pregnant.”
“Clark Gable’s child.” He couldn’t keep the cynicism out of his tone.
She nodded. “In the course of thirty minutes I learned I was an orphan, I was responsible for an innocent young woman’s death, and that I was going to be a mother. It starts you thinking.” She smiled crookedly. He wondered if she’d rehearsed the expression in front of a mirror with Lombard’s picture taped to it. “ ‘Madcap.’ ‘Screwball.’ Those were the words that came up most often when people talked or wrote about me. Not much of a legacy to leave your kid with. I was getting a little long in the tooth to get away with the reputation much longer before it became pathetic. The public already sensed it, and had stopped going to see my pictures. A star fades quickly under those circumstances; neither the doctor nor the people who carried me to his office nor his nurse recognized me. So what was I working so hard for?”