Death Was in the Picture Read online

  Dex’s office door was open—things in the outer office wouldn’t have smelled quite so bad if it were not—but I moved forward hesitantly, afraid of what I’d find.

  When I entered his office, Dex lifted his head from the desk and regarded me without recognition. His eyes were rimmed in red and shot through with blood; a roadmap to hell.

  “Oh Dex,” I said, putting the bag of ice on his desk. For a second, I thought he might say something in return. His mouth even opened, but all that came out was a kind of incoherent grumble that sounded something like “Grrk.”

  I felt a fleeting sadness for something lovely that I’d only seen for a moment on the day before. Things had been different then, that’s what he’d said at the time. I could see that they were different again now.

  I didn’t need to spend a lot of time trying to squeeze some sense out of him to know that Dex was currently past sensibility. Most likely, he just needed time to sleep it off. Failing that, I figured I’d do what I could to clean him up and maybe get some coffee into him.

  In the outer office, I put away my handbag and light coat and addressed myself to making coffee. When I’d measured out the amount of ground coffee usually appropriate to making a pot, I paused before putting the tin away, then tipped in another tablespoon for good measure. Dex was going to need all the help he could get.

  While the percolator busied itself, I sat at my desk and collected myself. The sound of coffee percolating cheered me slightly. It always does, along with the smell of fresh coffee that began to rise through the office, chasing away a bit of the reek of tavern that greeted me when I opened the door.

  I used the ice I’d brought to fashion a crude pack for Dex’s head and brought it in to him with his first cup of joe. The coffee was strong and black with a couple of spoons of sugar. I knew he preferred a splash of cream in his coffee—sweet and blonde was what he’d say—but I didn’t have any cream and, in any case, on this day, I figured he’d be best served with all the straight coffee goodness I could siphon into him.

  While Dex sipped toward a more sober state, I busied myself with the office. I didn’t want to spend the next eight hours soaking up the reek of smokes and booze.

  I opened the windows in Dex’s office wide, smiling to myself only slightly when he cringed on being hit by fresh air and morning sunshine. Next I carried his overflowing ashtray and lowball glass to the ladies’ room where I scrubbed both in the sink, probably quite beyond the scrubbing point required. While they dried, I grabbed the bottle of diluted ammonia and rag I kept on hand for cleaning and wiped down every surface in the place: the desks and the phones and even the walls where I could reach, pausing only to replenish Dex’s coffee when the level dropped low enough to warrant a warm-up.

  It took a long time but, with Dex in his present condition, I had the time available. When I was done, the office smelled of little beyond clean and Dex was watching me with something between amusement and nausea. Either was a definite improvement over how he’d looked first thing in the morning.

  “You feeling any better?” I asked, dropping into one of the chairs across from his desk.

  He took a while to answer. From the look on his face, he wasn’t considering his response as much as checking to make sure he still had a voice. When it came, it was gravel packed with phlegm. I tried not to shudder and I stopped myself from telling him to clear his throat. I wasn’t his mom, after all.

  “Better than what?”

  “Better than you did when I found you.”

  He shrugged, kicked back in his chair so far I feared it would fall over. “Sure. If ‘better’ means that the riveters in my head are on a break,” he said to the ceiling.

  I was pleased to see that he seemed at least coherent. Sober was ahead in the distance, but he wasn’t completely drunk.

  “Geez, Dex. High steel philosophy? It’s not even ten-thirty.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “I don’t get it: high steel… oh wait. The riveters. Like high steel workers. But it wasn’t philosophy. Just stating a fact.”

  He pulled a cigarette from its pack and lit up, sending a plume of smoke following his glance to the ceiling. I sighed, thinking of all the good cleaning work he was undoing.

  When he opened the top left drawer of his desk and pulled out a clean glass and a bottle of bourbon, I was beyond sighing. He took the icepack off his head, unwrapped the bundle of cloth and carefully plopped two of the melting cubes into his glass. He wrapped the remaining ice up again and pushed it back onto his head. I decided there was nothing I could do but wash my hands of him. I headed back to my own area to get his ashtray. If he was going to indulge in all his vices he might as well be tidy.

  Once I was seated across from him again, I waited. It was a long three minutes. He didn’t even meet my eyes. He mostly just sat there, letting go of the occasional sigh and rearranging the icepack on his head.

  “Are you gonna tell me what happened?” I said finally.

  “Whadjamean?”

  “Well… this,” I said, indicating all of it with a sweep of my arm: the booze in the glass, the cigarette smoldering in the ashtray and, most of all, the completeness of the sad sack that was Dex on this fine morning. Bleary-eyed, ill-advised hair of the dog and all.

  Dex moved the ice on his head around some more and shrugged, so I went on.

  “And Laird Wyndham is in jail.”

  Another shrug.

  “And you were there, Dex. Last night. And now something is wrong.” He didn’t say anything so I pressed on. “You’re going to have to tell me eventually, Dex. It might as well be now.”

  Dex plopped the icepack onto his desk and ran his hands deeply through his hair. So deeply I figured it was a good thing he was about twenty-four hours from the Brilliantine he usually pushed through it or his hands would have been slick with the stuff. He scratched absently at his jaw, and I could hear the stubble there as well as see it: a ten-in-the-morning shadow? It didn’t look good on him. He watched me closely for a moment, like he might say something, make some accusation, then thought better of it. Then he sighed. Came to some decision. Took another sip. Plunged in.

  “I went out to Santa Monica last night, like I was supposed to. I had instructions to stop by a gin mill on Montana to meet up with the actress broad who was going to be my ticket into the party.”

  I nodded. “The party at the Ambassador. You were supposed to pick up the starlet beforehand,” I supplied.

  “Right, right. Only she wasn’t any starlet. She’d ridden the earth around the sun a few times too many to be called that.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Who?”

  “The starlet. I’m trying to build a mental picture. Was she someone I’d know from the pictures? Was she beautiful? What was her name?”

  Dex hesitated for a moment like he was going to tell me what to do with all my questions. Then he just sighed again and I could almost see him giving in. “Her name was Rhoda Darrow. I don’t know if you’d recognize her. I didn’t. Which doesn’t mean anything, I know: you go to the pictures more than I do. And beautiful? What’s that? I wouldn’t have said she was beautiful. Another man?” He shrugged. “Maybe so. I’ll say this: I’ve never seen anyone as pale as she was.”

  “Pale?”

  “Yuh. She had on this gold kinda necklace affair? And I noticed it ‘cause it was real warm against her skin. It made her look like she was glowing.” He hesitated for a moment. “Oh: and she was freakishly thin.”

  “Freakishly?”

  “Yuh. But I figured maybe it’s a movie thing, you know? ‘Cause they say the camera adds ten pounds.”

  I nodded my head, understanding his reasoning. “Right. So if you start with someone very thin …”

  “Anyway, we didn’t talk much in the car. At first, we start off and I ask her how she knows Dean and she just looks at me with these big, cold eyes like I’m something from under her feet, and I shut up, ‘cause, you know. Who cares? What�
�s she to me? When we get to the party I forget about her for a while because I’m supposed to keep my eye on Wyndham, right? Like I told you yesterday, that’s what they wanted me to do. And at first it’s easy enough, because there’s not a lot of people there, and Wyndham just seems sort of mopey.”

  “Mopey?” I had a hard time figuring Wyndham for a mope.

  “Yeah. And I couldn’t figure it, but that was all right. What do I care if he turns out to be a mope? This big party is lining up and everyone is feeling hilarious. I figure my night is going to be eggs in the coffee, you know? Watch Wyndham, watch a bunch of dollies who aren’t so hard on the eyes, put down a few drinks, scuff the rugs, then make my report the next day. It was a party, but nothing was doing, all right?”

  I nodded. Sure. That made sense. “Where was your date?”

  “Rhoda? She was off somewheres. And it didn’t seem like we had a lot in common anyway. I figured, you know, Dean had fixed it that we go together. So she knew what that was about. It wasn’t like we needed to stay together like we were joined at the hip or anything. Which I figured was good, because she wasn’t much in the hips department.” He paused and smirked at this, as though he were pleased with his own joke. I motioned for him to continue.

  Dex told me he’d figured that the job was going to be such a walk-through that he’d started surreptitiously taking notes, just so he’d have something to report to the client: what had Wyndham drunk and when? Whom had he chatted with? Just minor stuff, so his report wouldn’t be empty. Also, since he didn’t actually know what he was looking for, it seemed a good idea to watch everything.

  I resisted the urge to ask Dex for details about Wyndham. What had he looked like when he was standing right there? What had he smelled like? How had it felt to be in his presence? Was it different than being around other men? I held my tongue, trying not to imagine the look Dex would have given me if I’d asked these things.

  “An hour goes by,” Dex continued, “maybe a couple. And I notice Rhoda with this other woman.”

  He told me he noticed the woman because she looked like rough trade. The fact that she was speaking earnestly with Rhoda Darrow was interesting, but not remarkable. In any case, the party was crowded by that time and he lost sight of them after a while, something he wasn’t concerned about. Not then, anyway. After all, he was there to watch Wyndham and one working girl in the mix wasn’t anything to be concerned about. Not in that particular crowd. Dex told me that the balance of the guest list seemed just as mixed, so there was a lot to keep his eyes on. He recognized some of the faces from the moving pictures and he figured that he’d maybe seen others in the papers and so on: politicians and men about town.

  There were things about that party Dex did not tell me that day in the office. I’m sure of it. Things he would never tell me. They weren’t the kind of things we talked about, Dex and me. In a way, he treated me like a little sister; like someone sort of delicate. I wasn’t, of course. I never was. But it didn’t matter: that’s how he saw me. That was the nature of the place where we fit together.

  What that meant, in the end, was that there were times I had to read between the lines. I was lucky, though. Dex wasn’t the best poker player. At least he wouldn’t have been with me. I saw him every day, probably spent more time with him than anyone else. I knew his tells. That helped with the deciphering. Helped me understand the things he didn’t say.

  For instance, Dex told me about the music in the bungalow—loud, loud, loud—and the clothes some of the women wore—louder still. Naturally there was booze. It flowed like a rising tide. But there were jujus, too and at times the smell of it permeated the air.

  “Is Laird Wyndham a hophead?” I asked when Dex reported this last. I imagine my eyes were wide with the question.

  Dex shook his head. “I don’t think so. Least, I never saw him with a tea stick.” But there had been others, Dex told me. And there’d been plenty of dope at the party. “And not just the kind you smoke.”

  So I have a mental picture of what this party looked like. I’m not sure it’s exactly right, but between what Dex told me and the stuff we heard later on, I’ve got a pretty good idea it wasn’t far off.

  My mind paints a portrait of debauchery; scenes from a bacchanalia and everything but the togas are in place. Beautiful girls running about half-clad; men leering so acutely they’ve got their hands full just keeping the spittle from their chins. The air is thick with the scent of hibiscus and day lilies, cigarette smoke and bootleg whiskey. Rich and glorious food glistens from tables. It spills from heavily laden plates onto thick linen tablecloths. Food enough for a hundred hungry families, but no one is really doing anything but skewering the occasional oyster, or pushing a silver spoonful of caviar onto a cracker on their way to the bar. Ashtrays are overflowing and as much drink is spilled as manages to find its way inside the revelers.

  Where is Dex in all this? Sometimes my mind places him in a position of watchfulness in a corner, his hat low over his eyes, a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, gun out of sight in its holster.

  Sometimes I paint him right in the thick of things. There’s a round-bottomed girl on his lap and his head is thrown back in what could be taken as either mirth or ecstasy.

  When I consider it all dispassionately, it’s possible that the truth lies somewhere in between. OK: probably not the lap girl, but the joy in the debauchery. One thing I know about Dex: he can get dirty with the best of them. On the other hand, he knows what he’s supposed to look like when he’s on a case.

  Laird Wyndham, Dex reported, was never part of this bacchanal scene. He was present for most of it, certainly, but he seemed preoccupied. At least, that was Dex’s impression, because he said that, when he saw Wyndham, the actor was never joining in, just hanging around the sidelines, sometimes with the telephone receiver pressed to his ear, other times looking wide-eyed and morose.

  “Sometimes,” Dex told me, “he’d lift his head and seem to look around as though he wasn’t quite sure where he was.”

  “Like he was lost?” I asked.

  Dex considered before he answered. “More like he didn’t know why he was there.” Wyndham did not, in any case, take part in the things that were going on all around them.

  The front doors of the bungalow were thrown open, and the party spilled over onto the hotel grounds, but the bungalow’s two bedroom doors stayed closed, at least when Dex was looking. Dex said he noticed because with both the front and back doors wide open, the closed doors inside seemed out of place. He tried to keep an eye on them, but was unable to detect any traffic into the bedrooms in his time in the bungalow other than once, late in the evening.

  Dex said he saw Rhoda appear at Wyndham’s elbow while he was on the phone.

  The woman indicated one of the doors to Wyndham, then faded into the crowd. Dex watched while Wyndham scratched his head, as though wondering what to do. Then he scanned the room. He and Dex touched eyes for a moment, but the actor’s eyes kept moving.

  Finally he sighed and headed to the back of the bungalow, closing the door behind him once he’d passed through.

  It was while Wyndham was in the bedroom that Dex’s date approached for a chat. He found it odd, even in the moment. Odd because she’d been ignoring him all evening and suddenly she was like a skinny cat coming to get her ears scratched, was the way Dex put it. He said it put his back up right away.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” Dex said as affably as he could.

  “Don’t need you to buy me a drink.” When she spoke, Dex remembered the used sound of her voice. He suspected the harsh caress of ten thousand cigarettes. “The drinks is free, and they’re right over there.” She used the filtered king-size in her hand as a pointer.

  “Still,” he said, moving toward the bar. “What’s your pleasure?”

  “Scotch soft,” she said, not arguing. Dex is a bit of a looker himself, and not afraid to know it. There aren’t a lot of women, no matter what age, who wouldn’t like
to sit across a bar from him.

  “So Rhoda, you having fun tonight?” Dex said, willing to make conversation.

  “It’s all right,” Rhoda said, looking up at him over the rim of her glass. Dex said he felt like a bug under a microscope, the way she looked at him. He said he could feel something inside himself squirm.

  He chatted with her for a while. He didn’t have anything else to do and he stood there, drink in hand, and felt her gently nudging him around until he was facing in the other direction. He was aware of it because he’d positioned himself in such a way that he had the front door in sight at all times. A habit with him. He liked to see who was coming and going. And now he did not. Now he faced the rear of the bungalow and he could see the two closed doors. The operation was so subtle that Dex felt another man might not have noticed these machinations at all. But he is a detective. And he was on a job.

  These are the things he told me and, of course, by the time he did, he had reason to figure he’d been right. I believed him, too. It’s been my experience that men who spent time in the trenches and came back to tell about it have a way of seeing things that others can’t. Maybe that’s how these few survived.

  Dex couldn’t remember the things Rhoda said, only that none of the words were important. What was important: the way her eyes pushed toward one of the closed bedroom doors every so often. The way she seemed aware of her surroundings: like that skinny stray cat. She didn’t look around, but Dex had the feeling that she was aware of everything that was going on.

  After a while—and it couldn’t have been very long, perhaps only a few minutes after he’d gone in—Wyndham came out of the room looking as though he needed a shower. He did not, Dex told me carefully, appear disheveled or in any way frightened or excited. He went back to the bar, then back to the phone, and Dex thought no more about the incident. Until later.

  Dex had a sense that, once Wyndham had rejoined the party, his date was finished with him. She stayed and chatted a bit longer but after a while, over Dex’s weak protestations that he’d get it, she made as though to get herself another drink, then faded back into the party. Dex watched her go without regret.