Henry hunched over the table, absorbing this news.
Before the police left, a technician took Henry’s and Deirdre’s fingerprints. Martinez explained it was to eliminate theirs from others that they lifted. Soon after that, Deirdre and Henry walked Sy out to his car.
Henry glanced up and down the street. “So Sy, is that it? Will they be back?”
“Always, they can come back. But they will need a new warrant.” Sy stopped and turned to face them. “Listen to me, both of you. If the police do come back, you call me right away.” He took out a business card and wrote a phone number on the back. “In case I am not in my office or in my car, here is my home phone. Anytime.”
He handed the card to Henry and winked at Deirdre. Then he got into his car and rolled down the window. “I know you, Deirdre. You are a Girl Scout. You will want to help them with their investigation. But the police are not your friends. They want to fix blame and close the case. I know you think you have nothing to hide, but believe me, we all do.”
As Deirdre watched him drive off she felt a chill as a light breeze rustled the leaves overhead. “So, tyell me zis,” Henry said, lowering his voice and imitating Sy’s accent. He put his arm around her and squeezed harder than he needed to. “Where’s that bag?”
“In my car.” Deirdre crossed the street and opened the trunk.
“You might have told me you’d taken it out of the house,” Henry said. “Freaked the hell out of me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“That, too.” He reached for the bag.
“Back off.” Deirdre pressed down with the end of her crutch on Henry’s foot. Henry yelped in pain.
Deirdre opened the bag and foraged around in it, pulling out a half-dozen twist-tied baggies of loose pills. Another contained a handful of the pot she’d already smelled, along with a packet of rolling papers. She gave all that to Henry, then rummaged some more, past papers, old clothes, and what she thought at first were telephone directories but turned out to be Motion Picture Academy Players Directories, making sure she hadn’t missed anything else that was illegal.
Henry was on a slow burn. “What are you going to do with the rest of it?”
“You heard Sy. I’m Dad’s literary executor. I’m going take it up to his office and start executing. Maybe I’ll throw all of it away. Maybe I’ll keep it all. I get to decide. You just take care of that shit”—she indicated what she’d given him—“so none of it comes back to bite us.”
Henry turned and stomped back into the house.
Chapter 12
Deirdre lugged the bag up the driveway to the garage. The door to her father’s office turned out to be unlocked, so up she went, pulling the bag step by step behind her.
As kids, she and Henry had been forbidden to so much as knock when their parents were up there working, so it felt strange to put her hand on the knob and just open the door. The little apartment exhaled stale, musty air. The walls were papered with fraying grass cloth and the ceiling was waterstained. An electric typewriter with a plastic cover sat on a metal table on one side of the room. Against a wall was a sagging pullout couch. On the table next to it Deirdre spotted a dust-free circle. That’s where the candlestick lamp the police confiscated must have stood. She raised one of the bamboo shades, releasing a cloud of dust motes, then cranked open one of the louvered windows.
The floor was stacked with piles of papers and videocassettes, and below a large mirror on the opposite wall stood two-drawer metal file cabinets. Deirdre pulled open a file drawer and poked through. Contracts. Correspondence. Bills and receipts.
Sort. Cull. Inventory. As Sy had said, she’d have to take it item by item, one thing at a time. It hardly mattered where she began.
She pulled out a file at random. Telephone bills starting in 1963. That had been around the year that her parents lost their contract at Fox and started using this space as their office. Toss.
The unlabeled folder behind it had about a dozen black-and-white stills from a movie she didn’t recognize. She set it aside. Keep.
Another file folder contained stock certificates. One was from the DeLorean Motor Company. Hadn’t they gone bankrupt? Ask Sy.
On top of the file cabinet Deirdre noticed a glass ashtray from Chasen’s, the celebrity hangout where her parents had dined regularly. She needed another pile for personal keepsakes. Not for any literary legacy, but because she’d always loved the restaurant with its red leather banquettes, dark corners for secret trysts, and special tables set aside for moguls and stars. Even if there’d been nothing on the menu that an eight-year-old could stomach.
Four items and already she’d started four piles. She hadn’t even cracked open the closet. Make that closets—there were two of them. She’d be at this for weeks, culling the trivial from the memorable from the valuable and setting aside items that signified her father’s literary life.
Deirdre went out onto the landing and retrieved the black plastic bag. She sank down on the floor beside it and started sifting through the items that Henry said their father would have wanted him to throw away. Newspaper and magazine clippings, a restaurant review for a Chinese restaurant on Beverly Drive dated 1978, empty Cuban cigar boxes. All of it: toss.
Next she pulled out six Motion Picture Academy Players Directories, the annual compendium that listed every Hollywood actor. She’d spent hours and hours poring over directories like these when she was stuck home recuperating after the accident. In it were pages and pages of head shots of actors, most of whom could have strolled down Rodeo Drive and not turned a single head. And yet they were all members of the Screen Actors Guild. It just brought home the formidable odds against becoming a celebrity.
These were a straight run from 1963 to 1968. Deirdre opened the 1963 directory, flipped through until she found someone she recognized—sexy, sultry Edie Adams who sang the Muriel Cigar TV commercial. That ad had ended with a sly wink and the suggestive, Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it sometime, delivered with a sensual subtlety that Madonna never could have managed. A few pages on, there was Donna Douglas, all wide-eyed with her Elly May blond curls tamed. Annette Funicello, Deirdre’s favorite Mouseketeer, looking grown-up and bland.
Tucked between two pages, Deirdre came across a snapshot. She recognized the white rippled edges as an early Polaroid. She was five years old the Christmas her father got their first instant camera. He’d snapped a picture of Deirdre with her new Tiny Tears doll, Henry, and their mother, still in their bathrobes and seated on the white “snow” carpet around their tinselly tree. Deirdre had watched breathless for what seemed like forever until the second hand on her father’s watch went all the way around and he opened the camera’s trapdoor. Like magic, he peeled away the film and an image bloomed.
But the person in this faded snapshot wasn’t Deirdre or Henry or their mother, and there was no Christmas tree. Instead it showed an attractive young woman, her collared blouse unbuttoned halfway, kneeling on the floor beside an end table and gazing at the camera with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes worthy of Keane. A mirror in the background reflected a window with a bamboo shade, and in front of it the photographer with the camera held to his face.
Deirdre realized with a jolt that the woman was kneeling in precisely the spot where she was sitting now. She turned the picture over. On the back, in red pen, were five asterisks.
The same girl’s picture, much clearer and crisper, was in the Players Directory on the page where the snapshot had been tucked in. Second row from the top. Melanie Hart, the kind of white-bread, feel-good name—like Judy Garland or Hope Lange—that studios selected for young hopefuls.
Poor Melanie Hart. If she’d harbored any illusions that this photo session would lead to her big break, she’d been disappointed. Flipping the pages of the Players Directory, Deirdre found more faded Polaroid photographs, each with asterisks on the back. Her father favored buxom blondes and redheads, each of them photographed the same way, in the same spot.