Sweet Women Lie
Loren D. Estleman
This is the one Helen and Don have been waiting for.
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
T
HE
C
LUB
C
ANAVERAL’S
rainbow front died short of the alley that ran alongside the building. Not for me the side that faced Griswold, where orange flamingos capered in the windows and a pink neon tube — turned off by daylight — scripted over a parti-colored awning that when cranked up resembled a roll of Life Savers. I stood in the alley among caved-in trash cans and smears of pale disinfectant powder flung over places where patrons had lost supper, pushed a button next to a brown steel fire door without a handle, and listened to the brazen noise inside. It sounded like a tired musician clearing his spit valve.
She surprised me by opening the door herself. I had been expecting the janitor, or at most one of the abbed and latted specimens in white disco suits who posed with her in newspaper advertisements. If I
had
been expecting her, it would have been in five-inch heels and piles of yellow hair and a dress that pushed her white breasts up through the hole in the ozone. It wouldn’t have had anything to do with this small slim woman wearing flat heels and a man’s denim workshirt with the tail out over black jeans. She wore her hair in a ponytail, brown, not blond, with silver glittering in the part. Her face was creased lightly around the eyes and at the corners of the wide handsome mouth that the caricaturists had had so much fun with when she dated Frankie Avalon. She looked a well-scrubbed, well-exercised forty, which put her a couple of years past her studio biography. Well, the white-haired moguls decomposing in their big oak cigar-smelling offices back then knew the teen audience, or thought they did. And what they thought was what we got.
I said, “You looked taller in my bedroom.”
It didn’t throw her. The wide mouth measured out forty watts of the famous thousand-candlepower smile. “Which poster was it,
Beach Blowout
or
V-8 Vampires?”
“Vampires.
You had on a shiny black leather jumpsuit unzipped to China. It ruined me for all the girls in the eleventh grade.”
“Don’t tell me. You had a surfboard and a stop sign on the other walls.”
“Just the poster. I was too straight a kid to steal signs and there’s no surf in Michigan. I’m Amos Walker.” I took off my hat. Grainy November snow slid out of the dent.
“Gail Hope. But I guess you know that.” She gave me the loan of a small supple palm. “Come inside.”
We were at the end of a shallow hallway lined with framed publicity stills from Gail Hope’s pictures. These included a honey of a shot of Miss Hope in a white sharkskin swimsuit fainting in the scabrous arms of a creature that appeared to be half reptile and half diseased elm. The rest room doors were divided into sexes by cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean pasted on them. She led me, trim white ankles scissoring under the barrel cuffs of her jeans, across the nightclub proper, dimly lit by sunlight through partially drawn blinds, to a door marked
OFFICE.
On the way we passed a lot of tulip-shaped tables and Brando biker posters and a divan made from the rear end of a 1960 Cadillac with tailfins. The walls were sea-green and pale orange, the floor a checkerboard of charcoal and pink. Evenings the colored lights played off paper lanterns, and musicians got up like Bobby Rydell and Connie Francis performed doo-wop on a bandstand the size of Warren Beatty’s wallet. By day it all seemed kind of tired, like a trick-or-treater on November first, but at night you could sit back sipping from a glass with an umbrella in it and pretend that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were still planning the invasion and Caroline and John-John were playing on the White House lawn.
The office had none of that. The desk was black-painted steel with a Formica top like the ones that migrate to gas stations, with a swivel behind it and a blank-faced computer on a stand. An Impressionist painting of a city street hung on the back wall in lieu of a window and there were only two photographs. One, in a clear Lucite stand on the desk, looked like a nonprofessional shot of Gail Hope taken twenty years ago. The other, on the wall, was definitely a much younger Miss Hope sitting on a sofa and sharing a laugh with a sandy-haired young man in an open-necked shirt and baggy plaid sportcoat. It took a moment to recognize him as Elvis before the black dye job and white Vegas gravity suit. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.
She saw me looking at the girl on the desk. “My daughter Evelyn. She’s studying law at UCLA.”
“I guess you didn’t want her in show business.”
“Her choice. I’m glad she made it. At least this way if she winds up on drugs it won’t be because a studio doctor made her take them.” She took my hat and coat and hung them on an antique halltree, the oldest thing in the building. She frowned approvingly at what the coat had been covering. We sat. I watched her fish a pack of Bel-Airs and a book of matches out of the top drawer.
“I own the building, I pay the taxes,” she said, lighting up. “If you’re worried about black lung, you know where the door is.”
I grinned and borrowed her matches to light a Winston.
Relaxing a little, she sat back, planted an elbow on the arm of her swivel, and pointed her cigarette at the ceiling. “Just to dispel any pesky illusions: I wasn’t a virgin when they cast me in my first beach picture and the only reason I agreed to do it was the studio promised me the whore in an Edward Albee play and they wanted a two-picture deal. Then they scrapped the Albee and gave me a biker show instead. After that I was typecast. My leading man in
Beach Blowout
was living with a Beverly Hills men’s-room attendant and every time the director said cut, the old-fart star from Hollywood’s Golden Age they cast as my father stuck his big sweaty hand inside my bikini. Disappointed?”
“Devastated. I feel like going straight home and smashing my forty-five of ‘Johnny Jump-Up.’ ”
Her quick little smile sharpened the creases at the corners of her mouth. They could almost be passed off as dimples. “It isn’t even my voice on the record. It wasn’t enough to be the season’s biggest drive-in draw, you had to be a recording star too. My agent’s idea, the old souse. I stopped sleeping with him soon after and he cut his wrists like a hysterical old woman. The studio could have hired Hitchcock for what it cost them to hush it up. See, I’m nobody’s Gidget.”
“You’re tough as old gravy, all right.”
“You say that now, but would you have gone back to see me seven times if you knew the truth then?”
“I never saw any of your pictures even once.”
That opened her eyes a notch. They looked different without the thick fringed lashes. “You had a
V-8 Vampires
poster in your room and you didn’t go to see it?”
“There wasn’t any money in my house for movies. When yours got to TV I was working nights. My father worked in a steel foundry when they weren’t paying much.”
“You were lucky. Mine cut out when I was seven. When I was making thirty-five hundred a week he came back and took me to court. They made me pay for his support.” She blew a dagger of smoke and crushed out her cigarette in a plain glass ashtray that was probably a collector’s item in some circles. “I got your name from L. C. Candy. He gave you information on some old jazzman you were looking for. You made a good impression.”
“I remember him. Did he play here?”
“Who, Candy? I couldn’t use him. There were no trombones in the early sixties. I rented him a room upstairs cheap while he was looking. He got a steady playing backup at the Chord Progression finally. I hear from him now and then. You ever carry money for anyone?”
“I’m bonded.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Sometimes. It’s not my specialty. Who’s shaking you down?”
She made a sound that was supposed to pass for laughter. It didn’t resemble her Malibu giggle. “If you knew as much about my private life as the slugs who used to read
Rendezvous,
you’d know how funny that one is.”
“Sam Lucy,” I said.
“Maybe you did read
Rendezvous.”
“Call it osmosis.” Gail Hope and Samuel Frederick Lucy — pinball, restaurants, cleaning and dyeing, and any other business that dealt largely in cash that could be exchanged for money skimmed off the tables in Vegas before wind of it reached the IRS — had made the columns a dozen years ago when the
papparazzi
caught them attending the première of
Broken Blossoms,
a remake of a silent soaper that was hyped as Gail Hope’s comeback to motion pictures. The prospect of short, ugly, potato-nosed Sam, in tuxedo and fedora and mirrored sunglasses, escorting the cool beauty in spotless white velvet and diamonds had raised all kinds of speculation among the people whose business it is to speculate over such things, then evaporated in direct proportion to the movie’s reception among critics and the ticket-buying public. Now the picture appeared occasionally on local TV between “High Flight” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Sam Lucy showed up even less frequently, usually in court on charges of conspiracy to commit something-or-other. If Miss Hope and Mr. Lucy were still involved, anybody who tried to put the bee on her was either new in town or tired of breathing.
“So what are you buying,” I asked, “and what’s the tariff?”
She reached inside the kneehole of the desk and placed a briefcase on top of it. It was one of those portfolios that women executives carry, tan pigskin with double handles and fine, almost invisible stitching, a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of office luggage. I rose a little from my seat and tilted it to see inside. The bundles were banded in paper and laid out with a mortician’s attention to propriety.
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said, in the tone she’d used when James Darren dumped her for Debbie Watson in
Hang Ten.
“Give it to Sam and tell him Gail wants out.”
I smoked my Winston down to the filter and extinguished it next to hers. “Do you want the briefcase back?”
“T
HE ACTUAL DEBT’S
more like a million, counting cars and furs and jewelry and getting set up here,” she said. “This is as much as I could raise on this place and the house in West Bloomfield. Anyway, you’re supposed to get a break when you pay off early.”