“Then one day toward the end of August I got a big envelope in the mail. There were twelve photographs in it. Eight by ten glossies. There is a great deal of difference between remembering something and seeing it… like that. Seeing yourself… God! I flipped my lunch.”
“It came by mail?”
“Yes. To my home. God only knows how Dana didn’t get to it first. There was a note with it. I saved it. I put it in my wall safe. Here it is.”
She took it out of the envelope and handed it to me. It was done with a carbon ribbon on an electric machine, with several strikeovers. “Save the envelope?”
“Not that one. It was mailed at the main post office in Los Angeles. Not special or anything like that. Not even marked Personal on the outside. The address was typed with the same type as that note. No return address. Go on. Read it.”
It read as follows:
Lysa, dear: You are practical. You know how the industry makes book. So you have no choice, of course. I have ten complete sets of the enclosed and a good idea of how to distribute them. I recommend the investment.
Installment plan, ducks. Ten thousand in used hundreds each time. Wrap in plain white paper: Tie securely. Each Sunday night starting a week from next Sunday, you or your dark secretarial type takes a drive. At midnight, precisely, pull into the Narana Kai Drive-in at Topanga Beach.
Order something, then walk alone with the packet in plain view, over to the public pavilion. Walk to the far edge of the concrete, next to the public phone booths. A phone will begin to ring. Count the rings carefully. Wait and it will ring again the same number of times. Go back to your car. Leave the drive-in at exactly twelve-thirty.
Take note of the exact mileage on your speedometer. If it says, for example, eight and six tenths and the phone rang seven times, when the milage ends in five and six tenths, (simple addition, dear) be ready.
You will be heading west on 101. Be over in the right lane, your right window open, packet in your little right hand. Look for a light ahead and off to the right. Slow to thirty-five and get just as far right as you can. When you see a little green light blink twice, toss the packet out onto the shoulder immediately.
If it blinks red twice, take the money home and come back the following Sunday. Each time you will receive the negative of one picture and all the prints made from that negative. They will come in the mail.
If all goes well, and if you have no clever and silly ideas, we should be through with this whole affair in twelve weeks.
“So damned complicated,” she said.
“Actually pretty shrewd. Two people could manage it with very little risk. One at the drive-in and pavilion to check you or Miss Holtzer out, then after you’ve heard the rings, phone up the road for his buddy to get into place at the designated spot. He gets a chance to see that nobody is hiding in your car. He follows you out of the lot, tails you until it looks safe, then passes you and gets there first and gives a headlight signal to his buddy to use the green lens on the flashlight. Not bad at all. Very difficult to trap them. What went wrong?”
“Nothing. At least not then. I paid. One night there was a red light. I don’t know why. It took thirteen weeks. I got the stuff in the mail. The worst ones came toward the last. Dana made the deliveries. Her nerves are better than mine, I guess.”
She jumped to her feet, flushing. “Don’t be dull, McGee. Close to seven million went into Winds of Chance. Risk money. The character who wrote that note knows this industry. He knew how I had to jump. It isn’t like the old days, where you could count on studio protection. Each picture is a separate packaging operation. There are just about ten men these days who can put the really big packages together. If each one of them got a set of those prints, why should they take any future chances on me? Those pictures are poisonous. What’s a hundred and twenty thousand compared to my potential? I liquidated some holdings that weren’t doing so good, and took my tax loss, and paid off. Don’t tell me what I should have done!”
It was a good act and I had to admire it. “How can I help you if all you give me is a smoke screen?”
“What the hell do you mean!” she shouted.
“All the industry cares about is money in the bank. Your name on a picture puts money in the bank. Just like Liz, Frankie, the Swede, Mitchum, Ava. They have not been dear little buttercups all the way. The days of the Arbuckle effect are long gone, dear. In our culture there is going to be no huge concerted public censure to drive you off the wide screens. If you get a little rancid, the PR people have you endow a dog shelter, and all America loves you. Drop the act.”
The faked indignation was turned off in an instant. She sat again, looked at me with sullen speculation. “Smart ass,” she said.
“What is it, then, that made you pay off?”
“A few little things. A while back I swung my weight around too much. It delayed the wrap-up and bumped the budget, and some people decided maybe they didn’t want to work with me. But I smartened up and settled down. I could read what it said on the wall. You know, like Monroe and Brando. But it left them edgy. Also, there’ve been a couple of little things from time to time. Not as bad as those pictures, but… along that line. It just didn’t seem to be the right time to make them feel any more insecure.”
“And?”
“Boy, you really want everything, don’t you?”
“I’ve learned that it helps.”
“I have a very dear friend. He’s very devout and very conservative and he owns great big vulgar hunks of California and Hawaii. If he can get the right paper signed by the Vatican and get loose, I’ll never have to take any crap from anybody again as long as I live. And one of those sets of prints would have gone to one man who would have felt obligated to give my friend a look at them. And that would have torn it.”
“So those are the real stakes?”
She moistened her lips. “Under community property, one half of about eighty million, honey. I am his dear faithful little darlin‘. It made the whole thing a lot more… chancy. Otherwise I would have borrowed some muscle from an old buddy in Vegas and turned them loose on this clown photographer. They’d be smart enough to handle that, but they’re not smart enough to handle what I need now. Actually, if Mr. X had no knowledge of my friend, and how long it takes to bull something through that Vatican crowd, he made a very stupid pitch. But with my friend in the background, there was just too much chance it might backfire. Before you bet, you count what’s in the pot. All my potential plus my friend’s heavy purse. So I paid off.”
“And hoped that was the end of it. And it wasn’t. Incidentally, can he clear you with his church?”
“I was never married in his faith, so nothing counts. I get a clean bill. By the way, McGee, Dana doesn’t know a thing about my plans for my friend.”
I asked her how she thought the pictures had been taken. “It had to be a long lens,” she said. “You can see the flattening and foreshortening effect. Off to the left, south of the house, I remember a little rocky ridge higher than the house with some knotty little trees clinging to it. It had to be from there. The angles match. But he had to be part mountain goat, and it had to be a tremendous lens.”
“Is there any clue at all in that letter itself, any hint that’s made you think of a specific person?”