Bride of the Rat God (26 page)

“Oh, everybody knows about this one,” said Alec. “I come here myself when I have time, for the music, but that’s usually only between pictures.” Reflections from the mirrored ball above the dance floor flashed across his glasses like sun thrown from the sea. “My brother has a speakeasy up the street, under the Pacific Sands Hotel. Awful house band, ukuleles, and rah-rah college songs, but then, Ira always did have a tin ear.”

“Hey, Alec, old
sadiq
!” A huge figure in sloppy tweeds appeared in the doorway behind them, seeming to fill the narrow hall. With a start, Norah recognized the white-bearded Father Christmas who’d spoken to Alec at Enyart’s on the night of the premiere, over a week earlier. Close up he smelled of cigar smoke and sweat. “Jack’s been telling me you’re looking for a man to—”

Alec held up a warning hand and glanced at Norah; Father Christmas paused, then took another look, and grinned. “You leading this innocent little girl astray, Ackey?” He held out an enormous, white-furred paw from whose creases the stains of engine grease would probably never be completely excised. “Captain Otto Oleson, at your service, miss.”

“Captain.” Norah smiled. “Norah Blackstone. And this,” she added as Christine wove her way expertly through the intervening crowd, “is my sister-in-law, Christine Flint.”

“Alec!”
Christine laughed, holding out the hand unoccupied by a glass of gin for Captain Oleson to kiss at some length. “Don’t tell me you know bootleggers!”

“Bootlegger!” Oleson swept off his soft cap in indignation. “Never! Just a humble pilot of an excursion boat out to Catalina and down the coast to Mexico... Named her after my wife,” he added gravely to Norah. “After all five of ‘em, actually.”

“Good heavens,” said Norah, surprised. “What’s she called?”

“The
Whatshername,
” Oleson replied serenely. “Fastest, most beautiful thing you’ll see on water from here to the Persian Gulf. You ask this boy to show you his photographs, you hear?” he added, slapping Alec on the shoulder and looking over at the two girls. “He may have to shoot movies for his living, but one day people are going to realize it’s the stills that’re the real art. You call me about—” He hesitated at Alec’s warning head shake, then concluded, “—about our business, you hear?”

“He used to run guns into Arabia and the Belgian Congo, back before the war,” Alex explained as, later on, cones of insubstantial pink cotton candy in hand, they sought the Electric Avenue streetcar once more. “I know him through Ira, my brother. When they passed the Volstead Act, he figured there was more money here without getting his head blown off. And he was right.”

Norah glanced behind them as they climbed onto the crowded streetcar. She had heard Oleson’s voice again and, as she’d thought, saw him through the crowding backs on the rear platform of the car. He held the arm of a seedy, unshaven man, talking in a low voice.

“Didn’t anybody
think
what would happen if they outlawed liquor in this country?” she asked, leaning on Alec’s shoulder against the jostle of the uneven street. The general smell and presence of liquor all along the pier and the boardwalk that faced it had not escaped her.

“Surely the congressmen who passed the law didn’t believe that every man and woman in the country was going to fling up their hands and say, ‘Goodness, I’m so glad they’ve made it impossible for me to get drunk.’”

“Are you kidding?” Alec’s eyes glinted cynically behind his spectacles. “That’s exactly what they thought would happen. We’d just saved the world for democracy, remember—or
they
had, anyway. Of course people would quit doing what was bad for them if it was against the law. What do you think all these films are about? You think most people
don’t
believe deep down in their souls that a woman who lives for nothing but sex and money is eventually going to run from her house with a bad attack of guilty conscience and fall over a cliff like she deserves? Instead of living on to a riotous old age surrounded by diamonds, French chefs, and dancing boys?”

“Well,
I
intend to,” Christine said matter-of-factly. She plucked a huge feather of cotton candy from her cone and licked the residue from her fingers. “Not that either Nick or Clayton
ever
committed suicide over me, like Charlie did in that silly film. And it was
Clayton,
drat him, who ended up with the dancing boys in spite of everything I could do.”

Alec looked down at her, surprised. “You tried to take him away from his dancing boys?” The fact that Christine would have tried to change anyone, even a husband, was completely unexpected.

“No, silly, I tried to take the
boys
.”

The car lurched to a halt, with Norah catching herself on the rail to keep from falling and Alec bracing his feet and holding her by the waist. The front platform where they stood was nearly as crowded as the car; all along the street people were coming and going from the brightly lit hotels, dance halls, cafes, and establishments of shadier purpose as if it were midday. It was as if the Volstead Act had never been passed.

Norah saw Captain Oleson step from the streetcar with his disreputable friend still in tow and head for the lighted glass doors of a cheap hotel. He glimpsed Norah, Christine, and Alec on the car and raised a callused hand in greeting as they passed.

Norah returned the greeting, reflecting that one certainly did meet all kinds in California. Then her hand froze in midgesture as Captain Oleson’s friend turned hastily toward the hotel’s door.

With his hair unkempt and three days of beard on his jaw, with a defeated slump to his shoulders and white visibly streaking his dark hair, Norah almost didn’t recognize him.

But the profile gave him away, the profile her mother had swooned for all those years before in the theaters of Leicester Square.

The man with Captain Oleson was definitely Charles Sandringham.

In the face of a lost suit in court, hide...

In the face of a lost suit in court,

return and accept your fate...

All will be well...

“M
Y DEAR
M
RS.
Blackstone.” Sandringham stood in the half-open door of his room, ravaged face a study in utter defeat. He shut his eyes for a moment, adjusting; then he sighed and stepped back to admit her. His hand shook a little as he closed the door behind her, but he managed a wry half smile as he added, “Welcome to Vermont.”

Norah looked around at the dingy room. A single window opened onto an alley smelling of sewage and ducks, and the morning light it admitted lay thin and unkind on the narrow bed and single threadbare towel, the rust trails down the porcelain of the sink, and the closet whose door didn’t close properly. Mentally she compared it with the quality of the furniture glimpsed in the corners of that bungalow on Highland and compared the man before her with the handsome and inebriated gentleman in evening clothes bowing to her at Enyart’s. She remembered her mother’s early love.

Her eyes met the actor’s. There didn’t seem to be a great deal to say.

“I take it,” he said gently, “that you really aren’t carrying a message from Captain Oleson?”

“No. I just told them that at the desk.” She wondered now why she had. Why she had intruded herself this way, taken on herself the burden of silence and guilt and that of being an accessory after the fact.

Sandringham sighed and brought up the room’s single chair. “Please excuse me for sitting on the bed. They seem to ration these things. God knows why. If anybody paid more than ten cents for it brand-new, they were cheated.” His palms and fingers were decorated with bandages and sticking plaster. He had not shaved since her glimpse of him last night, and his beard was thickly streaked with white.

“I hoped you hadn’t spotted me on the streetcar. I didn’t see you until I was on, because of the crowd, and then I hoped you’d get off before I did. I could have struck that old pirate for waving at you. Did Miss Flamande see me, too?”

Norah shook her head. Christine had gone early to the studio—early for Christine, anyway—and had left instructions for Norah to get the luggage back to the house, which had been thoroughly checked by the Los Angeles police force. No sign of Mr. Shang had yet been found. “Nor did Mr. Mindelbaum.” Then she thought and said, “But he must know, mustn’t he? I mean, he knows Venice and knows Captain Oleson...” She fell silent again and sat looking at the graying man before her, seeing how soft and white his hands were under the bandages and how the fingers trembled despite his efforts to keep them still.

“What happened?” she asked.

He said softly, “Would to God I knew. I didn’t think I was drunk enough at Brown’s party to pass out. Good God, I’ve played Hamlet to rave reviews twice as drunk as that and even remember some of it! But I... I woke up on someone’s front lawn on Melrose Avenue, my clothes covered with blood. And sometimes when I sleep—which isn’t often—I think I see Keith in front of me, peering at me...” His face for a moment uncannily mimicked the younger man’s, his eyes narrowing in puzzlement, nervousness, growing fear. “And I think he’s saying, ‘Charlie? What’s the matter? Why are you looking like that?’”

A long shudder racked him; he quickly covered his mouth with one bandaged hand. Eyes closed, words half-stifled by his fingers, he went on. “Usually I wake up then. I’ve been living in terror that some night I... I’ll remember what happens next. It’s been either that or the rat—”

“The rat?” Norah’s stomach lurched.

“What?” He opened his eyes, startled, as if waking from half a dream.

“Do you dream about a rat?”

He swallowed hard, his eyes avoiding hers. “I... I...” For a long time his voice seemed to jam, as though his flesh were unwilling to cooperate with his mind.

Very gently, Norah asked, “What does the rat do? What does it say to you?”

“It says... I don’t know. It...” His voice thinned and clinched. “Its eyes. I saw its eyes reflected in the mirror above the bar.” He shook his head violently, his eyes squeezed shut again as if against a vision of those other eyes, red and watching. Norah saw tears leak from beneath the battered lids.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a time. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I haven’t touched alcohol since that night I... If it was me, it was the drink.” His voice stumbled, his words coming fast now, falling out of him with panic and despair.

“I swear it was the drink, but I don’t remember. Thank God I made that film; thank God Brown is a cheat and a crook and trying to take over Enterprise Studios and can’t afford to lose the money on that stupid piece of costumed drivel I cranked out this summer! When I read his moving account of my parent’s illness and how he took me to the train station in his own car, I would have gone on my knees and kissed his shoes, I swear it, Mrs. Blackstone!”

He caught himself again, pressing his hands over his mouth, his whole body trembling as he fought for control. Wrung with pity, Norah leaned over and touched his knee. It felt like an ocean-smoothed rock under the worn and chemical-stained twill of his trousers.

The trousers were too short for him, showing bony ankles in lisle socks of a color she’d seen on Alec.
Of course,
she thought.
Alec must have lent him the clothes he’s wearing and probably the money to pay for the room as well.

Carefully, Sandringham said, “Mrs. Blackstone, please don’t betray me. At the end of the week Captain Oleson is going to take me to Mexico. I have no idea how I’m going to make a living there, but I swear to you I’m never going to touch alcohol again. I don’t know whether I killed Keith or not, but you see, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be convicted of murder, if it comes to trial.”

“Well,” Norah said thoughtfully, “after Mr. Brown and Mr. Fishbein got through with your place, there was certainly no evidence remaining to pin it on anybody else. On the other hand...”

She hesitated, struggling against the thoughts that persisted in surfacing in her mind.
I saw his mark there, where the young man was killed,
Shang had said.
The priest never remembered afterward doing the things that it was clear that he had done...

A half-remembered glimpse of a crimson dress, a drugged girl giggling, the shine of evil jewels...

Slowly she said, “Mr. Sandringham, listen. In the desert someone tried to kill Christine.”

His eyes widened with shock. “You mean that wasn’t just Fishy hoping people won’t notice Fallon’s acting when the film comes out?”

“No,” Norah said quietly. “That was genuine. Mr. Fallon’s acting has been fabulous, by the way. He truly seems to have found himself. But the thing is, Mr. Fishbein has been thumping the drum over it in the hopes of getting people—especially the reporters at the
Examiner
—to forget Mr. Pelletier’s murder. I’m wondering now if there isn’t some way to... to tie the two together. To give the police the impression that’s the direction they should look for the real killer.”

Her eyes couldn’t meet his as she said it. His own, she saw, turned aside also, and she heard the ragged draw of his breath.

“All I’d ask,” she went on after a time, “is that you go to a psychiatrist and get help.”

“Oh, God,” he whispered brokenly. “Yes, yes—I know I don’t have any other way of making a living, you see. Acting is all I know, all I’ve ever done. But the police, if they question me...” He looked up at her again, naked terror in his eyes. “If they hypnotize me, you see, I’m afraid of what I’ll say. Not so much because of what they’d learn, but because then I’d know.”

She reached out and took his hands, her own fingers shrinking involuntarily from the bandages that covered cuts inflicted by a broken champagne bottle. “Christine’s having dinner with Mr. Brown tonight,” she said. That had been one of the handful of messages waiting for them when they’d returned to the St. Mark’s the previous night. “I’ll ask her to find out how much the police know, how much of a chance we might have of bringing you through this. In the meantime, if you need money...” She hesitated again. “I don’t have much, but Mr. Hraldy is paying me as a scenarist for the rewrite I did on
She-Devil of Babylon.”
That had been another of the messages, and it had surprised her almost as much as the one that invited her, as well as Christine, to Frank Brown’s Christmas party in Beverly Hills a week from Friday night. A third missive was from Conrad Fishbein, reminding both girls that they’d just heard from Charlie Sandringham in Vermont, if anybody asked. “So I can give you a hundred dollars, if that will help.”