Deirdre turned on the lights and looked around. On a corner table, a copper lamp with a golden mica shade gave off an eerie glow. This outer room where Vera presided—Arthur used to say she was like a lioness guarding the gate—seemed smaller without Vera in it.
On the wall behind Vera’s desk were two doors. One connected to Sy’s office. The other was a louvered door to a walk-through supply closet. When Deirdre was little, before she started kindergarten even, she often came here with her father. While Sy talked with Arthur, he’d leave both supply closet doors and the connecting office door open so Deirdre could ride her tricycle from Vera’s office to Sy’s and around through the supply closet on her own miniature speedway.
Deirdre stepped into the supply closet, letting the door click shut behind her. Lines of light shined through between the slats in the door on the opposite side. Through the openings she could see Sy’s massive desk, large enough for a pair of law partners to work facing each other. Behind it a pair of casement windows overlooked the street. No coats hung from a coat stand made of deer antlers, the perfect foreground for a large oil painting of a Hollywood western landscape, complete with a cowboy astride a stallion that reared against the sunrise.
At the funeral, Deirdre would let everyone she talked to know exactly where she’d left the memoir. She hoped that the person who’d been looking for it would hear. The closet would be the perfect vantage point from which to watch and see who took the bait. Deirdre slipped the disposable camera that she’d picked up the night before from her pocket, held it up to her face, and aimed the lens through an opening between the louvers. Through the viewfinder she had a perfect view of Sy’s desk. She pressed the shutter. Click. Whirr. The film wound itself.
Deirdre left the camera within reaching distance on a shelf and pushed her way through the door at the back of the closet into Sy’s office. A glass bowl filled with cellophane-wrapped peppermints was on the desk. She put her hand into it and felt around for the desk key. It was there, right where Sy said it would be. Then she unlocked the desk’s wide center drawer and placed in it the envelope she’d brought with her. The words, written on the front in dark marker, would be hard to miss: One Damned Thing After Another by Arthur Unger.
With that, Deirdre locked the desk, just in case someone got there before she got back. She took the key with her and left, rearming the alarm on her way out. When she got down to the lobby, she put her sunglasses back on and tightened her head scarf. Then she exited through the parking garage and out into the drizzling rain. The limo was waiting at the curb.
The driver got out and opened the door for her. “All set?” he whispered.
Even she wouldn’t have recognized Tyler in that uniform and sunglasses.
Chapter 40
The cemetery and funeral chapel were just minutes away. The limousine turned in through a driveway between buildings. Hidden behind them was an oasis of green lawn and flowers, a true secret garden that was Westwood Memorial Park. The limo pulled up in front of the path to the chapel. Its sides were lined with benches, tidy flower beds, and shrubs clipped into perfect circles and domes. It struck Deirdre how much effort had gone into controlling the outdoor space—ironic, given that death was so not something that humans could control.
The three of them got out of the car. Deirdre hooked her arm in Henry’s, held her crutch in her free hand, and started up the path, through the misty rain, thick with cigarette smoke and crowded with umbrellas.
Arthur would have been pleased by the size of the crowd that overflowed the narrow A-framed chapel. Gloria embraced a man in a dark suit who greeted her and drew her over into a group. Among them, Deirdre recognized Vera, Sy’s secretary. Deirdre waved, but she didn’t follow. She had a mission, to get out the word that her father had written a memoir, that it had survived the fire, and that it was in Sy Sterling’s office even as Sy was in the hospital recovering from being attacked.
It felt awkward at first, approaching people she recognized from the parties her parents had thrown, people who’d come over to dinner. “Yes, it’s very sad. And so unexpected,” she said, trying her story out first on Milton Breen and his wife, Anne. He’d been a screenwriter, now a director, who had a house with a pool up in the canyon. Arthur and Gloria had taken Deirdre and Henry there to swim before they built a pool of their own. “And then on top of everything else,” Deirdre added, “the garage caught fire and we lost all the papers Dad had up in his office. Fortunately we were able to save his memoir. In it, he sets the record straight.” She added, even though it sounded a bit lame, “I left the manuscript in Sy’s office for safekeeping.”
The Breens didn’t ask which record got set straight. When she ran the same tape by Lee Golden and a man Lee introduced as another set designer, the reaction was more one of surprise. A little glee, perhaps, at whose secrets might be revealed.
As Deirdre worked her way through the crowd, she noted how each of Arthur’s friends reacted to her announcement that Arthur had written a memoir. To one and all, she added that Sy would be handling its publication as soon as he was released from the hospital.
A blond woman Deirdre didn’t recognize put her hand on Deirdre’s arm and air kissed both her cheeks. Along with the kisses came a familiar blast of rose and jasmine mixed with musk. Probably Joy. “Deirdre darling, I was so sorry to hear about your dad,” she said. The voice Deirdre knew: this was once-upon-a-time brunette Marianne Wasserman, her high school’s queen bee. “You haven’t changed a bit,” Marianne added.
Deirdre wondered how Marianne could tell since Deirdre had on a coat and head scarf and sunglasses. The crutch, probably. “Marianne,” she said. “It’s so sweet of you to come.”
“You remember Nancy Kellogg?” Marianne said, indicating the woman standing behind her. Deirdre never would have recognized the once-chunky redhead who was now a blonde, too, and skeletal.
Deirdre slapped down the bitchy voice in her head. It was nice of the two of them to show up, even if they hadn’t known her father at all and even if they hadn’t seen or talked to Deirdre since high school.
Nancy gave Deirdre’s hand a wooden shake. “We thought Joelen might be here,” she said, rising up on her toes and looking around. We. That made Deirdre smile. Apparently she and Marianne were still attached at the hip.
“Oh, there’s Henry,” Marianne said. “Hi!” She waved at Henry, who was on his way over to join them.
“Joelen Nichol,” Deirdre said. As Henry joined the group she shot him a look that she hoped conveyed don’t contradict me. “Gosh. I haven’t heard from Joelen in ages. No, I doubt very much that she’ll be here. But you are, so you never know.”
“Hello, Henry,” Nancy said.
Henry colored slightly. “We should go in,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get out of the rain. The service is supposed to start soon.”
Henry started to pull Deirdre up the path to the chapel. Deirdre waggled her fingers at Marianne and Nancy and mouthed See you, even though she knew that was unlikely. “Sounds like they know you,” she said to Henry under her breath.
“Knew me. Briefly. Nancy wanted to be in pictures.”
“Polaroid pictures?”
Henry chuckled. “I told you, I was an asshole. Where’s Mom?”
Turned out Gloria was already inside. She was sitting in the front row, which was cordoned off for family. Mourners had already filled about half the chairs in the chapel. Some Deirdre recognized as family friends. Others anyone would recognize. Gene Kelly. Ernest Borgnine. Ray Bolger. They’d all worked with her dad.