“Well!” she said. “How about you? You look fantastic.”
“We’re both fantastic.”
“Look, I have to work on me. I have to think about me all day every day. Diet, exercise, massage, skin care, hair care, yoga.”
“Whatever you’re doing, it works.”
I followed her over to a marble table, out of the sun. And after a slender Korean maid brought a Perrier for her and a rum and juice for me, Lee went into the house and came out ten minutes later with her hair brushed to gleaming. She was wearing lipstick and a little tennis dress.
“I really hated you, McGee.”
“It wasn’t a really great time for either of us.”
“These are better years, amigo. I was very hot back then, getting lots of scripts to choose from, spoiled rotten. Also I was trying for the world boffing championship. The all-American boffer. Anything that came within reach. And I seldom missed. As I did with you. Anyway, my psychiatrist pulled me out of that swamp. What I decided about you, McGee, was that if you were some sort of funny-looking little guy with pop eyes and no chin and a dumpy little body, you wouldn’t have turned me down. You wouldn’t be turning anybody down. You would take what you could get and be grateful. So, my friend, your reluctance wasn’t based on character. It was based on appearance. And that puts us both in the same line of work.”
“Actors?”
“Get used to it. We’re out front. I don’t need to work, dear, but I keep right on scuffling. I don’t want anybody to ever say to me, ‘Hey, didn’t you used to be Lysa Dean?’ You do your share of posing, both for yourself and other people.”
“You’re smarter than I remember.”
“Maybe I started thinking with my head instead of my butt.”
“Looks good on you.”
“And you are here to talk about Josie Laurant and Peter Kesner.”
“I think I’m going to go at this a different way than I planned at first, Lee.”
“Meaning?”
“I was going to keep the bad part of this to myself and con you along a little, here and there. But I find you just enough different to let me drop the whole bundle in front of you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Before I do, let me tell you one thing. Aside from the people whose help I had to have, I have never mentioned one word about your problem with the photographs and the blackmail.”
She nodded. “I know. I expected the worst after you walked out. I thought maybe you were justifying your own actions to come. Like hanging onto a set of prints and doing an interview for Penthouse. I held my breath for a year. You get used to backstabbing in this business. Finally I decided you were straight, and I thank you for it.”
“It would be nice if you would keep all this just as quiet.”
I liked the fact there was no instant promise. She thought it over, frowning. “Well, okay. It’ll be hard for me, but okay.”
“You know anything about Ellis Esterland?”
“Just that he was a rich plastics tycoon, and he and Josie had the daughter with the strange name who died as a result of a bad accident. Rondola? Romola! Josie must have lived with her husband for ten years. They never did get divorced. A legal separation, though. They lived in the New York area and she did some theater work, not much, and then came back out here after the separation. Didn’t he die a couple of years ago, in some strange way?”
“He was beaten to death. He had terminal cancer at the time. No arrests, no clues. He and his exsecretary were living on a boat in Fort Lauderdale at the time. He drove inland alone and was killed. The reason for his trip is not known.”
“I heard that Josie inherited a pretty good slug of money when Romola died. And that the money was from her father’s estate.” She tilted her head, took off her dark glasses, and looked at me with those vivid slanted green eyes. “Josie was involved with his death?”
“I don’t know. Here is how it looks right now. It looks as though Josie, through her friendship with Anne Renzetti, the secretary, knew everything there was to know about Esterland’s financial setup, his will and so on. And whatever Josie knew, Peter Kesner knew. Josie was supporting Kesner. When it became evident that Romola was a hopeless case, and if she died first Esterland’s money would go to a foundation, it was in Kesner’s interest to make sure Esterland died first. A problem in elementary mathematics. A couple of million is better than a hundred thousand, and worth taking some risks for.
“Josie, no. Forget Josie. Peter, yes. But how would he work it?”
“Very very carefully. He has contacts among out law bikers based on those two movies he made several years ago.”
“For low budget, they were very good.”
“Though I can’t prove it and probably nobody ever will be able to, I think those two bikers who were in one or both of those movies rode all the way across the country, set up a meet with Esterland, and beat him to death. In the movie or movies they were called Dirty Bob and the Senator.”
“I remember. Very tough people. Authentic tough, you know. You can always tell authentic tough from acting tough. Bogart was acting tough, but he was also a very tough-minded man on the inside. Nothing scared him, ever. Those bikers sort of scared me a little.”
“Would they kill people?”
“If the price was right, yes.”
“How do I find out what their real names are?”
“You find out from me, right now. Be right back.” She went in and came out five minutes later with a thick, well-thumbed, paperback book. “My bible,” she said. “The basic poop on five thousand motion pictures. All the statistics.” She checked the index, found the right page. “Here we are: Chopper Heaven. The part of Dirty Bob was played by one Desmin Grizzel. My God, can that be a real name? It probably is. And the Senator by one Curley Hanner. Let me check that other one. What was the name of it?”
“Bike Park Ramble, I think.”
“Sounds right. Yes, here it is. Same fellows. It was a sort of Son of Chopper Heaven and not quite as successful.”
“Any way I could get to see the movies? Just one would do. Either one.”
“I can call around the neighborhood. People are getting big collections of movies on videotape, the home-television kind and the three-quarter-inch commercial. I can show either one. I get tapes from the shows I’m on.”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“Why am I doing you favors anyway? Okay. After lunch?”
“Had it on the airplane.”
“It’ll just be a salad. Choke it down. Or the Snow Princess will snap a gusset.” She led me on into the terrazzo silence I remembered, where there was dark paneling transplanted from ancient churches and portraits in oil of the owner. There were white throw rugs, and sparse white furniture, and a large wall cabinet of glass and mirrors containing a collection of owls in pottery and crystal, in jade, wood, ivory, bone, and silver.
I stopped to admire them. “Used to be elephants,” I said.
“They’re in the bedroom.”
She led me to an alcove off the dining area where there was a window table for two overlooking the pool, the long slope of the garden, and the city beyond. The Korean maid brought the salad in a big wooden bowl, fresh spinach, with cheese and mushrooms, some bits of bacon, a dressing of vinegar and oil with an aftertaste of garlic. Tall nubbly glasses full of iced tea with mint.
In Lee’s casual conversation, in her expression, in her tone of voice, in the way she held herself, she seemed to be making an offer of herself, to be advertising her accessibility. And because any actress is such a mannered thing, such an arbitrary construction, I could not tell whether she was merely being her habitual self or inviting mischief.
“Who occupies the secretarial suite these days?”
“There’s not as much to do, of course. Not like it used to be. A darling young man comes in and works in there three days a week. The letters and cards keep coming, thank God. A lot of it from those late late late late shows, the pictures I made at the time they were filming Birth of a Nation. I had my eighteenth birthday on location. I was aching to look at least twenty. Can you imagine?”