Deirdre felt sick to her stomach. Her father had been taking advantage of young women who were desperate to break out in the film business. She stacked the photographs on the floor. They conjured the smell of My Sin and soiled sheets. At least her father had realized these needed to be destroyed. Burn. A pile she hadn’t yet started.
Deirdre heard footsteps on the stairs and a moment later Henry loomed in the doorway. He had on a black leather bomber’s jacket and badass cowboy boots. A motorcycle helmet—ice blue with an eagle sprouting red and yellow flames painted on it—hung from his hand. He tossed her a set of keys. “Here, so you can get in the house.”
“Did you know about these?” she asked, pointing to the pile of pictures.
“Good God. I haven’t been up here in ages.” Henry took in the deflated garbage bag, then the Players Directories and the snapshots Deirdre had stacked on the floor. “Got to hand it to Dad. He was a pretty slick operator.”
“You knew?”
Henry smirked. He picked up one of the pictures. “She doesn’t look too unhappy, does she?”
“You can be such an asshole.” She grabbed the picture back.
“And you can be so predictable. Dad was a jerk, but he wasn’t Satan. That’s how things were done in those days.”
Those days. The 1960s had been a decade of upheaval in Hollywood. Her parents, along with most of Hollywood’s “contract” talent, lost their jobs. From then on they worked project by project, from home, and didn’t get assigned work unless some panel of studio honchos, usually decades younger than they, gave them a thumbs-up.
There had been upheaval at home, too. The car accident that crippled Deirdre had been in the fall of 1963. A year and a half later, she was finishing high school, Henry was flunking out of college, and their mother was making frequent trips to a commune in the desert.
“They knew,” Henry said. “Every one of those girls knew the score.”
Girls? Women! Deirdre wanted to shout back at him. “And I guess he was so proud of himself that he made you promise to destroy the evidence.”
“You think this should be part of his legacy?” Henry poked a steel toe at the pictures. “If you’d just let me—” He leaned down and picked up one of the photographs.
“Put it down.”
Henry glared at her.
“I’m telling you now, Henry, if anything disappears without my say-so, even something like that, then I’m . . . I’m . . .”
“What’ll you do? Tell Mom?”
“Don’t push me. Okay?”
Henry scowled and dropped the picture. “Fine. Lucky you. What on earth are you going to do with all this shit?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned on his heel and walked out.
Good question. What was she going to do with all of it?
As Henry stomped down the stairs, Deirdre picked up one of the Players Directories by the spine. Shook it. More photographs rained out. The thought of what must have gone on in this room, on that couch or on the floor, made her sick to her stomach. Her father had been luring hopeful young women with promises he’d never had the clout to fulfill.
She heard the rumble of a motorcycle starting, and the floor shook as the garage door opener beneath kicked in. A minute later, the floor shuddered again as the garage door shut.
But what shook Deirdre was that one of the photographs that had dropped out wasn’t another pretty stranger. It was Joelen Nichol.
Deirdre picked up the picture. Joelen had been so young. Had Deirdre been in the house while her father was out here, indulging in this sordid hobby?
Disgusted, Deirdre shoved the picture into her pocket, grabbed her crutch, and started to struggle to her feet. She was half up when the crutch tip snagged on the plastic bag, slipped, and she went down with a howl of outrage. Dammit. Damn him. On top of everything else, if it hadn’t been for Arthur, she wouldn’t have to deal with the goddamned crutch at all. In a fury she shoved away the crutch and surrendered to what she knew was a sorry bout of self-pity. The chaos, the sheer volume of it, and the sadness of the tawdry, pathetic minutiae she’d have to paw through—it was too much.
The crying jag left her with a pounding headache and an aching chest. Defeated and deflated, she dried her eyes on the hem of her T-shirt, then tried to pull herself together as she surveyed the room. The piles she’d started. The file cabinets she’d barely cracked open. None of this had to be taken care of today, or even this week.
She scooted over so she could reach her crutch and set it carefully on the carpet, realizing as she stood that the crutch had torn a hole in the plastic bag. She bent to gather up the items that threatened to spill out of it. Among them was what looked like an armful of crumpled yellow netting, brittle with age. It was wrapped around a flat wooden box. On the box’s lid was a little metal shield with the word SHEFFIELD burned into it. She opened the box. Inside, set into a red flocked cardboard inset, was a knife with an old-fashioned antler grip. The blade was long and tapered. A silver cap covering the butt was engraved with the fancy initial n.
N for Nichol? Deirdre felt a chill creep down her back. She snapped the box shut and began to wrap it up again, her mind lurching ahead. Toss?Keep? That’s when she realized that the decaying netting with which she was wrapping the box was the tulle skirt of a dress with a high-necked lace bodice and long sleeves. She drew back, her hand over her mouth. The yellow satin underskirt was covered with dark stains. Blood?
There should have been more blood. That was what one of the expert witnesses had testified at the inquest into Tito Acevedo’s murder. On the carpet under Tito’s body. On the nightgown Joelen had been wearing when she stabbed him. On the nightgown Bunny had been wearing when she said she’d cradled him as he breathed his last. Well, here was more blood: on the dress Deirdre had been convinced made her look like a movie star when she’d borrowed it from Bunny Nichol to wear it to the party the night Tito was killed.
Chapter 13
Deirdre dropped the dress. She’d been fast asleep, passed out in Joelen’s bedroom when Bunny’s final fight with Tito had turned lethal. Hadn’t she?
It had been long past Deirdre’s bedtime when Bunny sent her and Joelen upstairs to bed. Instead the girls had sat at the top of the stairs and watched the party wind down. Deirdre’s parents had been among the first to leave, and Deirdre had run down to kiss them good night.
After the rest of the guests had gone home, after Bunny and Tito had retired, Deirdre and Joelen had padded downstairs. They smoked lipstick-stained cigarette butts left in the ashtrays and polished off the remains of pink champagne in abandoned flutes and vodka in martini glasses. They’d staggered about giggling, stuck fat black and green olives on the tips of their fingers, and gorged on leftover crab dip, pâté, and shrimp cocktail. They’d gotten slaphappy and performed a boozy duet, an a cappella “Let Me Entertain You.” They twirled. And twirled. So much that Deirdre staggered outside and puked in the bushes. After that, she lay on the grass beside Joelen and stared up at the sky. So this is what it feels like to be drunk, she’d thought as stars seemed to streak across the sky like meteors and the ground felt as if it were flipping her like a pancake. She rolled over and threw up again and again until there was nothing left.
She must have passed out on the lawn, because her memory of what happened after that was fragmentary at best. She did not remember going back into the house. She did not remember climbing the stairs, as she must have, to get to Joelen’s bedroom. She hadn’t heard Bunny and Tito fighting. She hadn’t heard Joelen leave the bedroom.
All she remembered was leaving the house herself. Being guided through a dark tunnel that smelled of camphor and floor wax, down a narrow, steep staircase—not the grand staircase in the Nichols’ house, which was like something you’d expect Ginger Rogers to dance down. Wondering why her father had come back to get her in the middle of the night. Shivering in her pajamas, she’d stumbled out to his car through chilly night air.