Loud pounding on the outside door woke me. My bedside clock said nine-fifteen. I’d overslept, which meant I’d missed the catering truck and I’d have to pay for greasy eggs in the motel coffee shop. My stomach growled as I stumbled to open the door.
Delia was leaning against the door jamb, looking a bit ragged.
“Sorry. Can’t find my bloody key.” She gave me one of her little-kid grins. “How do you do it, Nicky? You look like a dewy fucking virgin in the morning.” She pushed past me and eyed her own image in my mirror. “I, on the other hand, look like bollocks. Don’t tell me I don’t.”
I laughed. She had a way of dropping salty language into her plummy aristocratic speech that sounded whimsical rather than offensive. She didn’t actually look that bad considering last night’s battle. She had bed-hair and a blackened eye, but she didn’t look anywhere near as beat-up as Alistair. Clearly, she’d been the victor.
She pointed at Pandora’s still-closed door. “So you and Pandora overslept, too? Sam forgot to set the alarm. I promised a mother-daughter breakfast, but I’m already late for make-up. I’d rather she didn’t see me like this…” She trailed off, glancing at the bathroom door. “He’s not here, is he—Alistair? We had the most awful row last night. He can be so impossible, can’t he? He does insist on fucking with my head. You know—saying something one minute and denying it the next? He made me so furious I hit him. And he hit me back. He turns into such a child. But he’ll be feeling terrible remorse this morning. He always does.” She grabbed my arm and gave me a pleading look. “You’ve got to get him to understand—he has to stop fucking with me like that. I need to concentrate on this bitch of a role. Can you tell him?”
I nodded yes, although I had no intention of actually doing it. Delia seemed to think I had influence with Alistair because of our history, but his relationships didn’t work that way. You had to prove yourself in every encounter as if you were meeting him for the first time. No rollover points.
Delia gave a quick peek into Pandora’s room and whispered, “I’m glad she’s still asleep. Just tell her it will have to be lunch. I must run and have a quick shower.” She pushed past me toward the connecting door.
I might have warned her, but it never occurred to me Alistair might still be in there. I thought he’d have woken up got his drugged posterior back to his room.
Delia’s screams could have waked the entire population of Kern County.
They certainly woke Pandora, who let off her own wails. I ran into Pandora’s room, shutting the door after me, trying to minimize the kid’s trauma with soothing talk.
That’s why I didn’t find out about Alistair until Sam came pounding on the door about fifteen minutes later. When I opened it, Sam was gray under his movie-star tan. I was letting Pandora bang on the xylophone, but Sam couldn’t take it.
“For god’s sake stop that racket!”
He grabbed the toy and turned on me, his face crazy-mad.
“He’s dead, you little tramp. Don’t you get it? Your boyfriend is dead.”
Pandora let out a wail.
I didn’t get it right away, because I didn’t really think of Alistair as my boyfriend. And I was upset at being called a tramp. I hate to admit it, but that’s what was going on in my head: Sam Calhoun called me a tramp. I felt like he’d slapped me.
Pandora escalated her howling and Delia rushed in—having retrieved the xylophone from Sam. She was trailing a couple of policemen and not making much sense. It was hard to hear her once Pandora went back to kerplunking, but it sounded as if Delia had found Alistair lying pretty much where I’d left him on the bathroom floor. She’d tried to wake him and discovered he wasn’t breathing. After vocalizing her shock, she’d phoned Sam. Sam came running, then called Guido. Guido called the police.
One of Delia’s policemen led her out again and the other—an Officer Odom—started asking me questions. He had beady rat-eyes that stared right into you and made it clear they didn’t approve of what they saw. He kept calling us “you Hollywood people.”
I pointed out I was a Bryn Mawr English major doing some nannying before I started at Harvard graduate school in the fall, and the closest I’d been to Hollywood was the layover at LAX on the way here. But this only seemed to increase his disapproval.
Mostly I tried to ignore him. My focus was on soothing Pandora. She’d burrowed under the covers the way she did after one of her nightmares. I petted her through the blankets. When Officer Odom finally left, I sang her all four verses of “Rocky Raccoon,” trying to drown out Delia, who was getting hysterical. She was dropping f-bombs and telling everyone within hearing range that Alistair had committed suicide in her room to “fuck with her.”
I wished somebody would calm her down, since she was obviously in shock. She wouldn’t have been screaming like that if she’d been fully aware Pandora could hear every word. Besides, I knew there was no way Alistair had killed himself. It’s not that he wasn’t capable of suicide—he threatened it weekly. But he wasn’t depressed that night. Pissed off—yes; homicidal—maybe. But not in a mood to shuffle off his mortal coil.
But everybody kept blathering on about suicide. When I finally got Pandora to quiet down by feeding her the remains of a bag of stale M&Ms, I could hear Delia and Sam and Guido talking with investigators. It sounded as if they’d found Alistair with the bottle of Mandrax clutched in his hand. The consensus seemed to be that he’d OD’d—probably on purpose. The men apparently figured if they had to face going through life as Alistair Milbourne, they’d kill themselves too.
Or maybe it was just that a coroner’s ruling of suicide was going to be more convenient for everybody concerned.
Only two of us were not going along with the suicide talk—me and Officer Odom. I was pretty sure Alistair had O.D.’d by accident, and Officer Odom seemed to think he’d been murdered. He kept telling the coroner’s team they were part of a murder investigation, even though the other cops kept calling Alistair “the suicide.” Apparently harmony did not reign in the Taft law enforcement community.
I got Pandora dressed and she immediately ran to her mother, whimpering about needing to go potty. Delia gave me a reproving look, as if I’d been purposely keeping her daughter from making regular bowel movements. She gave me a dismissive sniff as she led her daughter into the bathroom.
Sam and Guido took off, and Officer Odom went to Delia’s room to talk to the coroner’s investigators. They left the connecting door open, so I was able to get a peek inside. I don’t know why I looked. I guess I couldn’t believe Alistair was really dead. He looked exactly the same as he had last night—lying on his stomach, with his legs on the amber tiles near the toilet and his head resting on the brown shag carpet of the bedroom. My first thought was how upset he’d have been by the wrinkled state of his linen suit.
But I noticed something odd. A prescription bottle lay near his hand, as everybody had been saying. The top was off—one of those child-proof ones that are as hard to put back on as they are to take off—and pills were scattered on the floor and on his sleeve. That was weird: the pills on top of the sleeve, nestled in the wrinkles. Hard for him to do by himself. Could Officer Odom be right about murder? At least I could see it wasn’t suicide. There were lots of pills scattered around. Some still in the bottle. If you want to kill yourself with pills, you swallow enough to do it right.
Alistair always wanted things done right. It was like a disease with him.
I stood in the doorway, unable to look away. He looked so crumpled and pale and—well, dead—that I started to tear up. Delia came from behind me and put her hand on my arm. I turned and hugged her and she sobbed into my shoulder. I was fairly plump in those days, and a head taller than Delia—what they used to call “Junoesque”—so I had good crying-on shoulders. That scene is still vivid in my memory—how fragile she felt—and how we clung to each other, weeping for Alistair, and for our own loss. It was the last moment of real trust and friendship we had.
The mood changed when Officer Odom sauntered back in and said he wanted to speak to Delia in private. That was fine with me, since Pandora needed one of us acting normal. By the time she emerged from the bathroom, I’d pulled myself together. I took her back into the little bedroom and read about how Pooh got stuck in Rabbit’s house and had to starve until he was thin enough to wriggle out. My hungry stomach provided real rumbles to illustrate the story.
A few minutes later, Officer Odom burst in.
“Let me get one thing straight, Miss Conway…” He slicked back his Brylcremed hair—Taft seemed to exist permanently in the year 1958—and said, “you stated that you were Mr. Milbourne’s girlfriend?”
I didn’t state it, but I’d nodded yes when he asked me the first time, so I nodded again. “We’ve dated on and off since my freshman year. He got me this job.”
“And how did you feel about your boyfriend having relations with Delia Kent?”
The question was absurd—as well as wildly inappropriate with Pandora there—and I told him so.
“Are you deaf, miss?” His little rat eyes bored into me. “She’s been screaming for the last hour about how he liked to fornicate with her.”
I was about to explain that Delia’s use of the “f” word was strictly metaphorical when Guido came rushing in.
“I have been on the phone with the studio lawyers,” he said. “They say the nanny should shut up. All of us should shut up. Sorry officer, but this interview is over.”
I don’t know if Guido ever knew my name. He always called me “the nanny,” and after that, everybody did. In the awful article in Variety the next day I was “the vacuous blonde nanny.” It made me furious at the time, but being the stupid, anonymous blonde saved me a lot of trouble later on. Very few people ever knew an heir to Conway Industries had any connection with the case.
But poor Delia’s name will be linked with Alistair’s until the day she dies.