“Are you sure you’re not imagining some of this?”
“Oh, I’m crazy,” she said seriously. “I admit it. You have to be slightly nuts to make it in this business. I grabbed the head cutter and gave him some of the best sex he’d ever enjoyed; and at the end of the weekend, he admitted that some of the really bad cuts had been made by Larry himself. You know — where there were four possible takes, he picked the one that put the wrong shadow in the wrong place or the one in which the way I spoke a line would make me sound slightly unpleasant. Damn it, Mike! You’re still looking skeptical. I know I can’t prove it. But I’m convinced it’s true; and that’s the important thing, isn’t it? And Larry knows I’m convinced because I told him so in Chasen’s and accidentally tipped a bottle of burgundy over on his new suit. That picture did terrible business, and I haven’t been working since. I did a little television at first, and then that closed down. There’s a rumor around that I drink Old Grand-dad for breakfast instead of coffee and orange juice. I think that rumor started in the New York Consolidated-Famous office, but there’s no way to fight it. All right, Mike, what would you do? Use your imagination. Somebody ruined your reputation so you couldn’t go on being a private detective. Would you give up and go to work as a short-order cook?”
She added, “Which doesn’t mean I wanted to murder the son-of-a-bitch. I’ll say that again. I was just trying to get a point across.”
“Did you know about his heart attack last year?”
Her eyebrows went behind the screen of her bangs. She asked for more bourbon.
“I keep forgetting I’m talking to a detective. I thought I might get away with suppressing that in the interest of a warmer relationship. Of course I knew about it. It happened in my house. He was trying to come twice in one night, and he’s too old for that sort of thing. Stop looking at me like that. I was not, I repeat not, trying to black him out so he’d lose control of the car. He’s completely recovered as far as that goes. But heart people are the world’s worst hypochondriacs. They think about it all the time. Larry’s carrying this big, vulnerable thing around inside his chest. I was trying to bluff him, that’s all; and the person you’re bluffing has to believe you mean it. Why aren’t you drinking?” she said nervously. “Let’s kill the bottle and open the other one and get stinking. Then maybe I can explain it to you.”
“I may be a little slow tonight,” Shayne said. “I don’t get these distinctions you’re making.”
“The main distinction,” Kate said, “is between Girl A, who tries to kill somebody and doesn’t succeed and is therefore automatically a loser, and Girl B, who’s merely trying to make her position clear. Now which of these two would you rather have sex with?”
“One at a time.”
She gave him a steady look. “Do you mean it? You aren’t going to get lofty and moral with me?”
He shrugged.
“Then will you help me, Mike? I don’t mean just help me stay alive. Help me make him give me the part. No, it’s too soon to ask you that. First I want to show you something weird.”
While she was on her feet, she poured them more bourbon. “Isn’t it lovely to know there’s an unopened bottle? Like money in the bank — not that I’ve ever had money in the bank.”
She pulled open a bureau drawer, empty except for a magazine which she handed to Shayne.
“This was left at the desk sometime this afternoon.”
It was a back issue, eleven years old, of a hugely successful magazine whose publisher, Oscar Olson, had made his reputation and fortune by creating a vast readership for a peculiar editorial mixture: blue cartoons, passable fiction, strong editorials on behalf of sexual freedom, and photographs of female nudes. This copy was smudged and dog-eared, as though it had passed through many hands. As Shayne took it, it broke automatically to the gatefold, a double page that opened out of the magazine so it could be unstapled and tacked on the walls of country stores and gas stations. It showed a naked girl lying on one hip on a bed under a canopy. The picture had been doctored. Her face had been replaced with Kate’s; and a comic-strip balloon came out of the lips: “How I wish I’d known when to stop.” A drooping white lily sprouted from between her buttocks.
“This happens to be a famous picture,” Kate said quietly. “Keko Brannon before she made her first movie.”
“Keko Brannon,” Shayne said. “According to Marcus again, Larry thought that was who was shooting at him.”
“I wanted to get that effect. There’s a famous story about how they met, and I was trying to confuse the bastard and upset him. Now as an expert witness, Mr. Shayne, what do you make of that goddamn lily?”
“It’s a threat. You’re being told to stop whatever you’re doing unless you want to end up dead.”
Kate shivered lightly. Shayne went on, “Somebody went to a lot of trouble. You can buy the current issue of this magazine for a buck, and it’s full of naked broads. Why go back eleven years for this particular one?” He closed the gatefold and checked the caption material. “Pussycat of the Month, Suzy Flynn.”
“Larry changed her name when he hired her. But millions of people would recognize the picture even with a different face. If you look hard, you can see a wisp of her pubic hair. We all have it; but in those days if it showed in the photographs, the magazine couldn’t be mailed. There was a big civil-liberties case that went on for years. When Keko turned into such a box-office smash, the picture got to be a collector’s item. Mike, I don’t know how much you know about this proxy fight. Has anybody told you that Oscar Olson is bankrolling the opposition?”
“I thought he was a magazine man. What does he know about movies?”
“Just that you can make money with them if you’re lucky. He’s been trying to finagle his way in for years. This is his big effort.”
Shayne tossed the magazine back on the bureau. “Now we start making connections. How well do you know Olson?”
“Nobody really knows Olson. I’ve been to his parties. When you’re in San Francisco, that’s one of the things you do. They run around the clock, and they get very dreary. Now the inevitable next question. I haven’t seen him undressed, and I don’t know if he has three balls instead of the usual number. He stops appreciating girls after they pass their twenty-first birthday, and I met him too late. I’m not fooling. Twenty-one is the age of compulsory retirement.”
“How old was Brannon when the picture was taken?”
“Seventeen, I think, a very young seventeen. She was part of the entourage for a while after that, but she never talked about it.”
“‘Entourage’?”
“Haven’t you read the articles? He likes to have chicks around. Secretaries and so on — some of them can actually type.”
“Keko Brannon and you. Were you friends?”
“Something else first. I talked to Oscar yesterday. I thought twice about it because even before I got that magazine I knew this whole thing was heavily booby-trapped. But I have a beau in New York who’s trust officer in a bank, and he has the voting of twelve thousand shares of Consolidated-Famous. I can influence which way he votes. I asked Oscar, if his people win control of the board, will I get the Buccaneer lead? He checked with the director and a few other people. The answer was yes.”
“Twelve thousand shares out of how many?”