They chuckled companionably together.
“Well, I won’t keep you from your work any longer,” Layton said, “—Tom, isn’t it?”
“Hal.”
“Sure — Hal. Been wonderful talking to you, Hal.”
“Any time, Jim.”
They shook hands like old buddies. Layton maintained his stroll until he was out of eyeshot. Then he began to sprint.
9
The Hathaway House was on Carmelita Avenue in Beverly Hills. It was a manorial two-story brick set in barbered lawns, with formal flowerbeds surrounding an Italianate fish pool. A colored girl in uniform answered Layton’s ring. He told her who he was and asked to see Mrs. Hathaway.
The maid left him standing in a black-tiled foyer, very cool and inhospitable. When she returned, she asked him to follow her.
She led him through a silent house to a rear door and a patio garden. Near a barbecue pit with the look of long use stood a verdigrised metal table with a rainbow-colored umbrella over it. Beach chairs were scattered about. A woman in dark glasses, wearing an extreme red bikini, was sunning herself in one of the chairs.
Layton’s first glance gave him the impression of youth; her almost entirely exposed figure was trim and firm, and her hair was a lustrous bronze. Then he got a good look at her face. They can’t do much about the faces, he thought. She had gone through so many face-liftings and neck-flesh treatments that it was impossible to tell what she must once have looked like. She had made a caricature out of what Layton suspected had long ago been great beauty. At close range the bronze hair had obviously come out of a bottle and some of her lower teeth were a denture. She looked sixty-five and might be six or seven years younger.
Mrs. Hathaway removed her sunglasses for a moment to inspect him, and he saw her eyes. For one horrible instant he experienced the shock of recognition. Layton had once interviewed a man condemned to the gas chamber who had slaughtered — with a hand ax — an entire family of seven, including a two-year-old and a three-month-old infant. Mrs. Hathaway had the same eyes.
“Sit down, Mr. Clayton,” she said. There was a terry robe lying within reach, but she did not reach for it. “Would you like a drink?” She put her sunglasses back on.
“Layton.” Layton smiled. “And thank you.” He seated himself at the table in the shade of the umbrella. “Are you having one, Mrs. Hathaway? My mother told me never to drink alone.”
She glanced at him — it was impossible to say how, because of the glasses; but no part of her ravaged face smiled in return. “I never touch alcohol. Alice, fix me a limeade. And fetch Mr. Clayton whatever he wants.”
“Layton,” Layton said again. “Bourbon and soda, please.”
The maid said, “Yes, sir,” and went into the house. Her pretty, intelligent face was as expressionless as her mistress’s.
“I used to drink,” Mrs. Hathaway said. “But past thirty a woman has to start counting calories. Did you know that one shot of whisky contains a hundred calories?”
“No,” Layton confessed.
“Watch your figure, I’ve always said, and the men will watch it, too.” She stretched lazily, arched her back like a cat, the tight bikini straining. Her large breasts were remarkably untouched by time.
Layton winced. “You certainly can’t have any trouble in that department, Mrs. Hathaway,” he said.
The dark glasses flashed his way for an instant. “Thank you, Mr. Clayton.”
He did not bother to correct her this time. “Well,” he said, “I don’t want to interfere with your afternoon, so... Oh, thank you.” He took the drink from the tray the maid offered, and waited until she had gone back into the house again. “What I started to say, Mrs. Hathaway—”
“I know what you started to say. I was wondering when the press would get around to me.” The old woman with the young body sipped her limeade. “It’s been nearly a month since I filed for divorce.”
“Oh,” Layton said. “Oh, yes. Yes.”
“Of course, neither George nor I has been in the public eye in recent years.” She was talking dreamily to the sun, as if through an interpreter. “I naturally don’t count that stupid job George has at a desk... What I mean is, the public has such a fickle memory. When George and I were stars — and I mean stars, Mr. Clayton, stars of the first magnitude, not the empty faces and feeble little talents that constitute stardom today — when we were right up there at the top, as I say, our breakup would have made headlines from coast to coast.”
If this female fossil with the killer eyes had once been a star of the same magnitude as her husband, it was a total surprise to Layton. He studied her profile, trying to detect what it must have been like a third of a century ago, in vain. Who the devil was it that George Hathaway had married? Layton struggled with boyhood recollections of his mother’s constant talk of “that divine George Hathaway” — she had been an ambulatory encyclopedia on the subject. But he could not remember.
He tried a long shot. “I’m going to throw myself on your mercy, Mrs. Hathaway. I’ve been trying to recall the name of that last picture you made, and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been able to. What was it again?”
“April Love,” she said coldly. “That’s fame for you. The critics called it our greatest.”
Our greatest. Of course. April Love had been George Hathaway’s final film. Costarring Linda Norman. This was what had once been Linda Norman. Good God in His heaven. He was a little boy when his mother had taken him to see April Love. He could not remember George Hathaway in it at all. But he had never forgotten Linda Norman. This was Linda Norman, the goddess Linda Norman.
Layton closed his eyes. “I remember you so well in it, Miss Norman — I beg your pardon. Mrs. Hathaway.”
“Silly boy,” the woman murmured; the murmur had a note of physical repletion in it, as if in and by themselves the words “Miss Norman” had constituted a Lucullan feast. “It’s so good hearing it again. You know, Mr. Clayton,” she went on in that intimate murmur, “I could have had as great a career in sound pictures as I had in the silents. But George and I were planning to be married, and his career ended when sound came in. That eununch’s voice of his, you know. It would have crucified George to have me go on, while he fell by the wayside. I was in love with him. So I sacrificed my career.”
“I understand,” Layton said. He had produced his notebook and was pretending to take notes.
“Money, of course, was no problem,” she went on. “That was before the days of the big income taxes and George and I had never squandered our money the way so many big Hollywood stars did in those days. George didn’t start throwing his money away — on rotten investments — until after he stopped earning it.” Layton had to steel himself to keep looking at her; now it was her smile that recalled the cold-blooded killer he had interviewed. “Lousy businessman, George. About all he has now is his income from that belly-scraping job at KZZX. So I’m not asking him for a thing except this house and its contents. I do hope you understand, Mr. Clayton, that I’m not the kind of woman who sucks a man dry and then divorces him. My money is intact — I don’t need his.”
Layton was wondering how he could maneuver the conversation around to the real reason for his visit. This was one he’d have to play by ear.
“Do you have any definite plans, Miss Norman,” he asked, poising his ballpoint, “for after your divorce?”
He watched that formidable bosom expand again as she breathed deeply. “I may try a comeback,” she said.
Comeback, Layton pretended to write, and then he rather desperately took a long pull at his drink. “Now about the divorce, Miss Norman—”