Dim Sum Dead (20 page)

Okay. He was begging for it.

B
ellagio Road was quiet and dark as I pulled up in front of Catherine Hill’s Bel Air estate. The gate was open this time, permitting access to the long driveway that was lined with old-fashioned lampposts. I followed the evenly spaced puddles of soft white light on the cobblestones all the way up to the house. Lit up at night, the home’s formal pillars and classical façade gave it the look of a mausoleum. The entire scene seemed more imposing than I remembered it from yesterday’s bright afternoon visit.

I noticed a couple of cars were already parked near the entrance. A Lincoln Town Car and an older Jaguar. I left my own Grand Wagoneer among them and took the steps up to the front door.

Before I could ring, the door was opened. Standing there was Catherine Hill.

“You are on time,” she said, her voice pleasant, her light English accent charming as always. “Please come in.”

Catherine was dressed in a long silver lounging robe, with a zipper up the front. And if silver lamé was not enough to make her fashion statement, there were white marabou feathers at the neckline and at the borders of each flowing sleeve. Tonight she had abandoned her turban and instead sported a highly piled platinum blond hairdo complete with perky bangs. It was a wig.

“Don’t you look adorable,” she said, ushering me inside, showing her famous dimple.

For tonight’s meeting I had abandoned the good-little-girl suit and instead wore my usual kind of thing, a long black dress with ankle-high, thick-soled boots and socks.

“I like the way you are wearing your hair down tonight,” Catherine said. “It’s so becoming on you. Don’t you think so, Helen?”

She turned and I saw Helen Howerton standing there, wearing purple slacks with a large silk overblouse. Tonight’s print featured zebras standing on red circus balls, all on a purple background. Her hair was still the shiny black foot-ball-helmet-with-a-flip ‘do of the day before.

“So much hair,” Helen Howerton said, looking at me. “And it’s such a lovely color. My hairstylist could do something marvelous for you,” she offered. What a thought.

You might have noticed that on this second visit, it was not I who was offering up the insincere praise. It is in just such minute social adjustments as these that you can most quickly detect the changing winds and the power shifts in Hollywood.

The two women showed me to the living room, which was off to the right. The walls of the room were painted the same deep persimmon red-orange as the entry, and the room was decorated in English mahogany antiques and big, downcushioned pieces upholstered in olive damask, scattered with dozens of assorted throw pillows. The lavish living room had all the touches of a professional decorator, like the hundred silver-framed photos of Catherine Hill and her famous friends arranged artfully on the table behind the sofa. The enormous square coffee table and every other side table held bowls overflowing with fresh flowers and museumquality displays of Catherine Hill’s collection of rare antique Victorian dolls.

Rosalie Apple stood next to the large grand piano by the front windows and turned as we came in.

“Hello, Beall,” she said, saluting with two fingers touching her gray hair.

She looked much as I remembered, short-cropped hair, little makeup, and no obvious signs of plastic surgery. Rosalie
was dressed in a white oxford shirt with navy slacks and Gucci loafers, conservative as before.

Eva James looked up at me from the spot where she was seated, next to the fireplace. The fire’s glow softened her tight jawline and lit up her sleek blond bob. In this light, she looked almost exactly as I remembered her in her glory days as queen of the MGM musicals. I suspected she always devised a way to sit near the edge of a lighted fire.

Helen Howerton and her zebras settled down on one of the three massive sofas that formed a U around the fireplace. Catherine and Rosalie took seats on the opposite sofa, and I decided to face the fire, on a sofa of my own.

I set the red-leather book down on my lap.

“Shall we chitchat, dear?” Catherine asked. “Or would you prefer to get down to business?”

She seemed calm and friendly. I suspected my recent theft of the red book had not pleased her one bit, but her talent to hide her true feelings was a gift, one I had witnessed before, in fact, the previous afternoon. We seemed to understand each other. We had both been deceptive. We had both discovered the other’s deception. We were, therefore, very much alike. No need to make a scene. And besides, I had the red book and was about to return it. They dared not upset me now. Power, while fleeting, feels supremely cool.

“Could you please tell me what went on between you and Quita McBride?” I asked.

“All right,” Catherine said, sounding perfectly agreeable. “She called me on Wednesday morning and told me she wanted to trade something valuable. She claimed that an old mah-jongg set had just been found. She reminded me that Dickey kept a diary and that there were many secrets in it that we girls wouldn’t care to have come to the press. She said when the mah-jongg set was returned to her, she’d have the diary as well.”

“She was attempting to blackmail you,” I said.

“Filthy girl,” Eva James said.

“She’s gone now, dear,” Catherine Hill said sweetly to Eva, then resumed her story. “Quita asked me to pay her
twenty thousand dollars in cash and also agree to be uncooperative in a lawsuit that was pending. You see, I was going to give an affidavit that Quita did not want me to give. I agreed, of course. We all of us had reasons we wanted to see that diary. Dickey had teased us for years that he had been keeping a journal. Everyone had heard him say he kept it safely hidden in his mah-jongg case.”

“I see,” I said. “But instead, you sent your gardener to steal it before Quita ever got possession of it. How did he know where to find us so he could steal it?”

Catherine Hill settled her hands in the folds of silver lamé that covered her lap and continued. “Quita said there was a man who was fixing up Dickey’s old house. This man found Dickey’s old mah-jongg set hidden in the wall. Imagine that. She said this young man had just called her from the house but that he couldn’t meet Quita and give her Dickey’s old case until six that evening. Of course, we had no real interest in the mah-jongg tiles. It was the diary we all wanted. Quita suggested we meet after midnight to exchange the money for the diary.”

“You agreed?”

“I said yes. But, of course, I had no intention of waiting until after midnight to get that diary.”

Eva spoke up. “We couldn’t allow someone else to read Dickey’s diary, you see.”

“And,” said Rosalie Apple, adjusting her navy slacks as she crossed her legs, “what if this Quita thought it over and decided she could get more money from us? We couldn’t have that.”

Catherine shook her platinum wig and continued. “I sent my man, Flax, to go fetch it for us. He drove to Dickey’s old house on Wetherbee as quickly as he could—it’s not far—but the man there was just leaving. Flax noticed the man wore a bulky backpack and the house itself was under construction, so Flax followed the man.”

“That was my partner, Wesley,” I said.

“Ah,” Helen spoke up.

I tried to keep my eyes focused on Helen’s wrinkled face,
but they kept wandering off to check on all those zebras balancing on her big shirt.

Helen took up the story. “Flax said your partner, Wesley, was a very nice safe driver and so it was incredibly easy to follow him into Santa Monica. Flax had hoped the young man would leave the mah-jongg set in his parked car. That would have been easy. A quick little bash and bingo, another car theft in Santa Monica, and we’d have our diary. But no. Your partner took his bulky backpack along, so Flax simply had to follow.”

“Your friend is very tall, Beall,” Rosalie said. “Insanely easy to follow a tall man. Flax had no problem keeping him in sight, even walking around in that crowded outdoor market.”

So, it was as simple as that. It was almost just after Wes arrived at the Market that we met up and he showed me the mah-jongg set. And soon after, this man Flax ran off with it.

“But this guy, Flax, he threw the mah-jongg set away,” I said. “Why?”

“We didn’t care anything about that old set of tiles,” Helen Howerton said. “It was the diary we needed to get hold of. Hell, if Flax had been stopped and he was still holding on to that old wooden case, he’d be arrested. And then where would we be? His family has worked for Catherine forever. They’d track it back to us.”

Catherine said, “I told Flax, go get the diary and whatever you do, ditch the old case. And he did what I instructed. He always does. Good man.”

It wasn’t that complicated, I realized. Wes and I had just stumbled into an old storyline that had been set in motion for decades. It seemed straightforward enough. And why, really, shouldn’t these old ladies have their secrets back?

“You never gave Quita the money?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Catherine Hill said, her voice for once sounding heated. “We got the diary, hadn’t we? Why should we pay the silly thing a cent? But that wasn’t as important to the girl as my testimony. She had really been quite desperate for me to stay mum.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering her earlier comment. “What sort of lawsuit was this?”

“She wanted all of Dickey’s money,” Rosalie said.

“Of course she did,” Eva James said, giving the fire another poke.

“But she didn’t deserve it, did she.” Helen added. “The little bitch.”

I put my hand on the red-leather diary and rested it there. “Tell me about the lawsuit.”

“Dickey had never really married Quita. Not legally. They had a phony little wedding ceremony on a vacation he took her on a few years back. A friend of hers got her a counterfeit marriage license from the Grand Caymans or some such place, but it was not legit.”

“Wow,” I said. Not married.

“I knew he never married Quita,” Catherine said. “Hell, I think Dickey was still legally married to another woman from way back. Quita was fighting the estate, of course, and naturally, she didn’t want me to testify. But then, of course, the attorneys for Dickey’s estate did.”

“Did you read it, Beall?” asked Rosalie, still giving me a steady look. “The diary?”

“Did you read what Dickey wrote?” Helen echoed, her voice almost trembling.

“They were mostly a pack of lies,” Eva added, her voice oozing charm. “I’m sure he made up the most ridiculous nonsense.”

I thought of the secrets these ladies were living with all these years. The money trouble Rosalie had gotten herself into. Dickey’s accusations of embezzlement might or might not have been true. Many celebrities had little knowledge of their own finances. Who could say what was fact at this late date?

And with Dickey McBride’s reputation as a lady-killer, it was no wonder so many famous names appeared in the little red book with stars of conquest next to their names. I could imagine Eva James, the dancer, worrying about the affair she had had with Dickey. He had noted it in his diary along with four out of five stars. I hadn’t taken the time to figure
out all the dates, but Dickey implied in his diary that Eva was married at the time to one of McBride’s movie-star friends. Since Eva’s last husband, an old Hollywood hoofer, was now dead twenty years, I wondered why she would care so much about the diary. But shame never died.

Helen Howerton, who played the teenaged sidekick to Catherine Hill in all those schoolgirl pictures, was another of Dickey’s dates—five stars. I wondered if Dickey had to peel Helen out of her trademark loud prints when they tumbled into bed.

His book betrayed even Catherine Hill, the woman who claimed to be the one person in Hollywood with whom Dickey had never slept. McBride wrote that he’d been Catherine’s very first lover, back in a dressing room when they were both in their teens, in the days when they played brother and sister in the movie
Summer Storms.

“None of us has read the diary, you see,” Rosalie said. “We couldn’t.”

“Then we’d see what he wrote about each other. That wouldn’t do at all,” Eva James said, looking eternally young next to the fireplace.

“Mama took care of it for us,” Catherine Hill explained. “We gave it to Mama to keep nice and safe.”

“We were going to burn it,” Helen said.

“Yes, but we planned to do it all together,” Catherine said. “Mama hid it for us, using the same trick that Helen and I used to hide a diary in our old
Heavenly Girls
movie.” She eyed me. “But yesterday, when we realized you’d actually found our book—”

“We were shocked, you know,” Helen said, interrupting.

“And amazed,” added Eva James. “We thought we had been so clever. We were certain we had fooled you.”

“Yesterday,” Catherine repeated in a louder tone, taking back the stage, “when we realized that you found the book—why I swore up and down—”

“She did, too,” Helen said.

“—and for the first time in my life,” Catherine Hill continued, “well, I never thought I’d say this, Madeline, but I wished the Lord had made just one less Catherine Hill fan.”

I laughed out loud, and so did the others.

Their secrets were so harmless, I thought. Most of them. But there was one old secret that might still hold some venom. The world at large might not care, but among this close circle of friends, one item from Dickey’s journal could still do damage.

Dickey confronted Rosalie Apple about her irregular bookkeeping and his missing royalty payments. She denied any wrongdoing, he wrote. In his anger, he fired Rosalie as his personal manager.

But then McBride accused Rosalie of something that in those old days was considered even more unspeakable. The rejected playboy figured out why he could never get this one woman into his bed. Rosalie Apple was in love with her favorite client, Catherine Hill. When McBride confronted her, Rosalie never denied it. In Dickey’s diary, next to the name “Rosalie Apple” there were no stars. Instead were the words, “old maid.”

Rosalie was still looking at me intently. “Did you read Dickey’s journal, Beall?”

“Or did you stop yourself, perhaps?” Helen Howerton asked. “Maybe you had second thoughts?”