North of Montana (13 page)

The odd thing is, the dates on the newspapers stop in 1974.

Now I understand the room. Why the brown louvered shutters are closed. Why the furniture, despite its grand scale and spotless upkeep, seems worn, and the air feels closed in and damp. This is a seventies house that has not been changed in twenty years. This room was designed for smoking dope and drinking alcohol and flirting and fucking and hiding from the California sun. It is a stage set for the kind of hedonistic pleasure that was taken in a certain style during a certain age and preserved intact so Jayne Mason can revisit that lusty image of herself whenever she steps through the doorway.

I pace the room, trying to get a feel for how recently it has been used and for what. No ashtrays. No wastebaskets. The fieldstone fireplace has been swept clean. But right above it, so poorly hung that it angles out from the wall as if about to tumble, is an utterly astonish ing painting. A seascape of sailboats racing across translucent blue-green water stirred by wind, so alive that it actually radiates light, too alive for the boundaries of its heavy gilded frame, the outdated room, the movie star’s sterile home.

Seeing such a thing in real life is a shock. I stare with longing into the passionately felt world of the canvas, unexpectedly moved to tears. The vitality of the painting makes everything else, including my own sad heart, seem dead.

“It was painted by Edouard Manet.”

I spin around. I hadn’t known there was anyone else in the room besides the cardboard cutout of Jayne Mason.

“She saw this when she was filming on Majorca. I have always encouraged her to collect art, but it does not suit her. She is only interested in acting, which is lucky for me. I am Magda Stockman, her personal manager.”

She is a large woman, a size fourteen, but dressed in a black suit with braided white piping of such fine wool and style that it makes her figure look trim. She moves with a rustle—it must be lined with silk. As we shake hands several heavy gold charm bracelets on her wrist jingle like Christmas bells and I am enveloped by a sweet, rich perfume. She wears black stockings and black high-heeled pumps with two back-to-back gold Cs on the toe that even a lowlife like me recognizes as the trademark for Chanel.

“Are there paintings like this all over the house?”

“Only a few small Picassos. It is just as well. Jayne is not the kind of person who enjoys to sit by the fire and look at pictures. She must always be
in motion. ”

Magda Stockman rolls her hands over each other like a small engine so the bracelets tinkle merrily. The accent is mellow and burnished, possibly Central European. I get the impression she has been in this country a long time but cultivates the accent as part of the persona. She has broad Slavic cheekbones and moist unlined skin that seems extremely white against the black hair pulled severely off the face into a bow. She is so artfully put together that the only way to imagine her age is to guess somewhere between fifty and seventy.

“I am sorry to say that Jayne and I cannot see you today. We are having a meeting with some people out from St. Louis and it cannot be interrupted. Please to apologize to the FBI.”

My back stiffens.

“This matter came to us through the Director. We were told it was urgent.”

“It is of the highest urgency. But not today.”

She smiles indulgently with polished red lips.

“Please take your time and relax. You are of course welcome to walk down to the beach. Ask Jan if you need anything.”

Having given the United States government thirty seconds of her time, Magda Stockman hurries out, drawn by the ringing of a telephone somewhere in the house.

Jan reappears with a silver tray on which is a china coffee set patterned with strawberries—pot, cup and saucer, cream and sugar, the whole thing: service for one, like you’d see on a bed tray in one of those mail-order catalogues with hundred-dollar sheets, including a silver teaspoon on a blue cloth napkin.

He sets the tray down carefully, then runs a strong square hand through his tawny hair. “We’ll call your office to reschedule.”

“Jayne likes yellow roses.” Figuring if everyone else is calling her Jayne I’ll give it a try.

“Yes, she does.”

And that’s it. He leaves me with the coffee and the souvenir Manet. I have never been told quite so graciously to take a flying leap.

•  •  •

I walk down to the beach, what the hell, the path across the sloping lawn looks enticing, bordered by fluttering pansies in combinations of yellow, red, blue, and purple that remind me of my mother’s cotton hankies flapping on the clothesline in the backyard. At the top of the cliff a sea wind powerful enough to blow the hair straight back is like an elixir drowning you with exotic promises—Hawaii is out there and China, after all—so by then there is no choice, so what if the wet air wilts the beige linen suit I wore to meet the movie star, I grip the metal chain that loops along the steep wooden stairway and make my way down a hundred vertical yards of headland rock.

Here I am sitting on Jayne Mason’s private beach at three in the afternoon as the sun reflects off the sand like a mirror with just the right intensity of heat, watching the whitecaps on green water, tasting the salt in the air, no noise, nothing in the brain but wind, no other humans or their works within view, utterly alone, thinking I would cheerfully commit a capital crime in order to have something like this, when a man climbs unsteadily over the rocks adjoining the next cove. For a moment he is a black silhouette against the brilliant screen of light and I think he must be a fan of Jayne Mason or a tabloid photographer trying the marine approach to her property. I get off the weathered wooden chest I am perched upon, my hand hovering instinctively near the weapon under my jacket.

As he lumbers closer I realize it is Tom Pauley, the limousine driver.

And that he is completely naked.

“Tom,” I call out to warn him, “it’s Ana Grey, FBI. We met in the alley, remember?”

“Sure do.” He continues walking until he is standing right next to me. “Gorgeous day.” Unconcerned, he opens the chest. Inside is a tangle of old netting, some clothes, folded towels, and a red cooler. Inside the cooler is fresh ice and some brown bottles of Mexican beer and fruit sodas and half of a shrink-wrapped watermelon.

“Jeez, Tom. We have to stop meeting like this.”

He grins. His lips are sunburned and chapped. Shoulders padded with fat. A pale distended belly. The usual dangle. And a pair of bow legs the color of boiled Santa Barbara shrimp.

“Have a beer.”

“I’ll take a black currant–boysenberry.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was invited.”

“By who?”

“Your boss.”

“Someone under investigation?”

“Could be.”

“Someone on staff?”

“Yes, Tom. We know all about that scam you’re running.”

He smiles and raises his eyebrows over the Dos Equis.

“Got me.”

“You can run but you cannot hide.”

We stand there looking out to the ocean and I’m the one who feels like an idiot because I’m dressed, don’t ask me why.

The tide is coming in faster now. The boulders Tom climbed over are almost totally obscured by foamy surf, which makes it harder for a second figure, a woman, to make her way around the jutting cliff, clear the rocks, cross the sand, and join us.

“Meet Maureen.”

Also naked.

Maureen is a very thin redhead, too thin, as if she’s got an eating disorder. She has bony arms and flaccid thighs, two small mounds with flat nipples for breasts, but great hair. Ropes of terrific red hair whipping around in the quickening breeze.

Maureen takes Tom’s hand and says nothing. I guess she’s shy. She reaches for a denim shirt inside the locker but instead of putting it on—as I hope she will—spreads it out and lies down.

Tom grabs a towel and sits cross-legged next to her, his middle-aged form like a big pile of pearly white Crisco beside her delicate nymphette body. One meaty hand tips the bottle of beer to his mouth while the other smooths Maureen’s young freckled forehead.

“You two look like you want some privacy.”

“No, no. We’re just on a break.”

“This is how they take coffee breaks in Malibu?”

‘Whenever possible,” Tom grins.

“You both work for Jayne Mason?”

“Maureen does her clothes.”

“I have a friend named Barbara who, due to a tragic childhood deprivation, is obsessed about Jayne Mason and where she gets her clothes.”

Maureen shrugs her bare shoulders. “She takes them.”

“What do you mean, takes them? From a store?”

“From the studio.” Maureen keeps her face to the sun, speaking without opening her eyes. “She’ll be like talking to a grip or someone, doing her Greta Garbo imitation, and I’m backing the car up to the dressing room and carrying out boxes of stuff.”

‘What kind of stuff?”

“The stuff she wore in the movie. I guess it’s kind of like hers anyway.”

“Does this behavior have anything to do with the drug problem?”

“That’s over. She gave up drugs,” Maureen tells me in a solemn voice. “Big time.”

Tom rolls over and props up his head on an elbow.

“They all steal from the studio, Ana. Standard operating procedure.”

“Someone will go, Where did you get that dress? And she’ll go, Oh, it’s from my personal designer, Luc de France, when it’s really from Twentieth Century-Fox. I love Jayne.” Maureen smiles into the infrared rays.

I realize this girl can’t be more than twenty years old with about as many brain cells.

“How long have you been working for Jayne?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a year?”

“Isn’t that fast to be given such a big responsibility? Don’t they have union rules?”

“Maureen’s an assistant,” Tom explains. “There’s someone else—or actually a few people—in charge of, you know—”

“Designing, buying, fitting,” Maureen chants like a child at her lessons, “conceptualizing.” She waits. Her eyebrows frown. “I don’t really want to do clothes.”

“No?” I drain the bottle.

“I have a great idea for a screenplay.”

“Little Maureen’s big dreams.” Tom strokes her hair affectionately.

“Maaagda
thinks it’s a good idea.” She opens her eyes just wide enough to glare at Tom.

He smiles placatingly. I toss the bottle back into the cooler.

“Why don’t you stay and join us?” he offers.

“Join you in what?”

“Whatever.”

I look out at the ocean one more time. The waves are six feet high now, heavy and forbidding.

“In another life. Nice to meet you, Maureen.”

I walk back to the cliff, grab hold of the chain, and hoist myself up the stairs.

When I get to the top, just a touch out of breath, I am startled to meet Jan, who is standing on the head of the promontory, wearing the upper half of a wet suit, hair streaming back over the shoulders in a stiff wind. He is looking at the ocean through a pair of high-powered binoculars.

“Dolphins,” he explains as I pass, without taking his eyes from the glass.

Clearly he is watching the naked lovers.

TEN

JAN DOES CALL to “reschedule”—and cancel and reschedule—maybe a dozen times. I keep working on my other cases but drop everything each time Jan says his boss is ready to meet. Once I go all the way to a fancy Italian restaurant at the top of Beverly Glen only to be told by the maître d’ that Miss Mason will not be able to meet me but I should go ahead and order lunch as her guest. I choose a seafood salad for $21.00 and when it comes, to my horror, a tiny naked octopus the size of a dime crawls out of the mixed greens to the edge of the plate and collapses onto the tablecloth.

“To keep the calamari extremely fresh, the chef puts them into the salad alive,” the waiter explains, “and kills them with olive oil.”

The next day I find a rubber octopus hanging at the end of a noose over my desk. What astonishes me is that one of them—probably Kyle—actually stopped off at a joke store and bought a rubber octopus. The merry pranksters also made photocopies of a picture of Jayne Mason and taped them on my wall: “Meet me at the Polo Lounge!” “Meet me in the bathroom.” “Luvya, baby!” “To Ana—My Dearest Friend.”

It is now “absolutely set in stone,” according to Jan, that I am to meet Jayne Mason in the office of her Beverly Hills attorney a week from Monday. That settled, I am able to give full attention to deep intercourse with Les, a new mechanic at Marina All-Makes. I actually enjoy having work done on the Barracuda, it’s such a quixotic challenge to keep it running. Although he can’t explain why the headlight is shorting out he is telling me the smart thing would be to replace the entire wiring and light bulb assembly. It will cost around $300 and we’ll have to wait for parts.

I become aware that something is going on at the far side of the bullpen, a small commotion over a mildly extraordinary event, as if someone had won fifty bucks in the lottery, but I am concentrating on Les, trying to control my irritation, appealing as he was at seven a.m. this morning in a filthy flannel shirt, ponytail down the back, long blackened fingers wrapped around a white paper coffee cup, aromatic vapors and stale breath commingling in the cold air.