“Mary! I had no idea you thought of me that way—as so ruthless or so abject. I was with Maud, stargazing, just out there on the starboard rail. We heard the shot—we’re perfectly innocent. I loved Thad, you know that. He looked after my dogs when I was on location.”
This gave me an idea. I pounced upon it before it could get away. “I have a question. If I feel you have answered honestly, I shall let you go on your way. Who among us loved Thaddeus Irigaray? I believe that may tell us more than asking who hated him.” Proper Maxine Mortimer, from first syllable to last. “I certainly did,” I answered first. And it was true. He’d kept me in steady work for a decade and let me bring my cat on set. Hell, he’d proposed eight times. When Laszlo Barque left him, he stayed in my guest room for a month.
No one else spoke up. Percy stared determinedly at his feet. Maud and Dante looked quite thoroughly bored, smoking together by the piano. Finally, Maud stubbed out her cigarette and said, “All right, fine, I loved him. He looked after me post my little spot of nastiness with Oxblood. I was supposed to get the Mortimer contract, you know. The studio wanted me. But Thad wanted…I don’t know, I suppose he wanted a blonde.” She hurried to correct the bitter edge in her voice. “But no hard feelings! Why, that was ages ago.”
Freddy’s mouth kept running away from him. It twitched; it grimaced. It wanted to say something his brain knew it oughtn’t. He was drunk as a lord, careening from side to side, as though that great huge ballroom were too small for him, that coarse, awful elephant of a man.
“How about you, Penny?” Freddy hissed. Penelope Edison looked as though she were going to split apart at the seams. She kept rubbing her arms as though she were freezing to death. She stared at her husband, such a horrible stare, full of pleading and misery. Helpless tears started rolling down her face and they didn’t look like they’d ever stop. “Penny? Cat got your tongue? Who do you love, Pen? Me? Percy? How about Algernon over there? Or that sad sack of shit?” And he pointed to the ruin of Thaddeus Irigaray.
“Please, Freddy,” she whispered. I have never seen anything quite so wretched as Penelope Edison weeping.
“Please what? I didn’t do anything. But if somebody asks a question, it’s only polite to answer. And being polite is so important, isn’t it? If I forget one little P in an ocean of Qs, it’s the end of the goddamned world, but you can just stand there and quiver and not answer the fucking question?”
“Freddy, stop.” Percy put a hand on his shoulder and Edison swung wild, whacked him right in the eye. Percy doubled over, holding his face. “Fred! I’m trying to help you!”
“You need help, not me,” Freddy snarled back. “After everything I’ve given you people! Without me, without my family, you cunts are just flouncing around on a stage in hell with nobody fucking watching. And what do I get back? What’s my fabulous fee for making your entire disgusting existence possible?” He crossed to the body in two enormous strides and kicked Thaddeus’s shoulder, kicked him over onto his back, and kept on kicking him. Thad’s poor limp arm fell onto the floor.
Everyone started hollering, grabbing Edison, and gnashing their teeth—but all Maxine Mortimer saw was Thad’s left hand, the one poor softhearted Mary had worried would go all pins and needles on him. He’d curled his fingers into a fist. He had something in there, clutched in his bloody fingers. Nobody else saw it. They were too busy wrestling a drunk tycoon, sliding around in a good man’s death.
“That garbage shit-fucking cocksucker fucked my wife,” wailed Freddy, dogpiled under the biggest stars in Tinseltown. “That’s who loved him. My Penny. That’s who!”
Penny shook her head back and forth, her mouth hanging open, not breathing. She flopped onto the floor. “I didn’t…” she gasped. “I didn’t…”
No, she didn’t. Penelope Edison most certainly did not. She couldn’t have. Not in a year of Easters. What the hell was going on here?
“Jesus, someone get her a paper bag,” Maud Locksley said.
“Tell them!” shrieked Edison. The King of Sound and Colour was bawling his eyes out in a pool of cold blood. “That fucking whore snuck around on me while I was in Elish for the Worlds’ Fair! And when I got back, you were all slim and trim again, weren’t you, you bitch, you goddamned gold-digging Jezebel—”
It was going so well. Just like a movie. Right now, in my stateroom, in the silence of the deep, woeful night, I think it was going so well because…that’s what happens in a movie. I cast a spell, and for a moment, just a moment, life had a script. The detective locks the door and names the suspects and, eventually, someone confesses. That’s how the whole business works. It’s instinct. Freddy couldn’t resist it. Or Percy couldn’t. Couldn’t resist the desire to crawl inside the script. It’s safe in there. Nice. Warm. The script will look after you.
But Percy stopped it.
“Everybody cool off!” Percival Unck, for all his faults and virtues, can yell louder than anyone I know. Quiet on set! “Listen to me. This was an accident. Mary, I appreciate what you’re doing, but it’s not necessary. I am telling you the truth. Freddy and I were having a few scotches out on the deck, talking about the new camera line. Fred clapped me on the back, and when he turned around, he saw Penny and Thad through the ballroom windows. Thaddeus kissed Penny, and Freddy saw black. You can’t blame a man for that. He shouldered the door in, confronted Thad, it came to blows, we struggled—all of us, all four of us! We struggled and the gun went off. It could have been any of us who pulled the trigger: me, Penny, Fred—we all had our hands on it at some point. But it was an accident. And what we have to decide now is: How many lives does this terrible accident destroy?”
I had such a horrid feeling in the hollows of my stomach.
He’s lying.
Like MM always said, it’s bad maths. The sun might come up blue as Neptune in the morning, ice might turn to fire when it melts, I might become the long-jump champion of the world, but Thaddeus Irigaray did not kiss Penelope Edison. It didn’t happen. I go for a bit of each, but Thad was true blue. I wanted to say so, but I couldn’t. Not in that room. Not with all those people who Thaddeus didn’t trust enough to tell when he was alive. Not with that Algernon B-for-Bastard already writing next week’s column in his head. Even a corpse can be ruined. And a corpse’s reputation doesn’t mend. So I kept mum. God help me. I wouldn’t let Thaddeus go down in the books as just another dead pervert. Because that’s how we all end up, of course. No. I wouldn’t let his heart be somebody’s morality tale.
Or maybe I was just afraid. Of Freddy, of Percy, of all of them. I couldn’t help it. I thought, Percy, baby, you wanna run it back and do it again so you can get a better angle on the bullet? Make certain the shadows are right on Thaddeus Irigaray’s eyes when the light goes out inside them? Or was there a better line you could’ve hurled in his face? Or at Penny, or Fred? And why would you lie for them? Why would you bother? You don’t even know Penny, not really. You’ve been chummy with Fred since you were kids, sure…but the fraternal bubble never extends to wives. So what did Thad do to you, Percy? How did he really earn his bullet? Why is this happening?
“Whose gun was it?” I asked.
“What?”
“Whose gun? Who brought a gun to a wrap party?”
“It’s mine,” Percy admitted. Oh, Percy. No. “I was showing it to Fred. Showing off, I suppose. I don’t fancy ending up in a Plantagenet vault, Mary. I protect myself. Maud’s got a pistol strapped to her thigh. Ask her. It’s not so strange.”
Then Percival Unck told us how it was going to be. His best directorial effort and only thirteen people ever saw it. Thaddeus had a heart attack. The ship doctor could be paid off; he barely graduated from medical school, anyway. We’d clean it all up, all of us together, and Thaddeus would be cremated before anyone knew the difference. The rest of us would keep the secret for our own reasons. Because we were accessories, because we wanted system-wide distribution for our tawdry little magazine, because we didn’t want a divorce to leave us penniless, because we wanted a part, because we didn’t care, because we loved Thaddeus Irigaray and didn’t want him to be remembered as a homewrecker or worse, because we could live forever on the favours Unck and Edison could do us.