Pretty soon after the cops left, a team of lawyers arrived in a big black limo and Guido told us to pack up to go back to L.A. He said they’d worked out something with the local coroner that would allow us to give our sworn testimony in L.A. so we didn’t have to stick around for weeks waiting for the inquest—which Guido kept calling the “inquisition.”
Guido announced he was going to finish filming on the studio back lot, even though some of the scenes would have to be re-shot. He was apparently willing to sacrifice artistic vision in order to get the hell out of Taft.
I was totally with him on that, although I would have liked some breakfast first.
Our time in L.A. was surreal—like living in a TV reality show. Growing up an academic household, I was never much into celebrity culture, so I was totally unprepared for the media army waiting to assault us when we arrived. Sam Calhoun was an A-list leading man in those days, which meant every time he farted, it was news to the tabloid universe. So once the Alistair/Delia/Sam story broke in Variety, cameras were trained on our hotel 24/7 and battalions of reporters and photographers followed us everywhere. We were essentially under siege.
As I said before, I’d had no experience with Hollywood, and in Taft I’d been fine hanging around the fringes of the shoot wearing cut-off jeans or whatever—but suddenly I had to be ready for my close-up from the minute I woke up in the morning. Pandora, too. One picture of Pandora having a tantrum in the lobby—probably over something to do with the damned xylophone—made the cover of the National Enquirer with the headline “Is Delia Kent an Unfit Mother?”
Since then, I have never been able to look at an aquarium full of captive fish without a pang of empathy.
We had a TV in our suite, but Delia instructed me not to tune in any news or gossip programs, because the distorted, speculative reports would be too upsetting to Pandora.
But obviously Delia had seen them. She got more agitated by the day.
I’m sure it didn’t help that she couldn’t see Sam. Sam had a house in Brentwood—complete with TV-sitcom-star wife—and was apparently hiding behind its guarded iron gates any time he didn’t have to be on the set. Their affair would probably have stopped at the end of shooting, anyway, but the loss of Sam’s company didn’t help Delia’s mood.
Cooped up in the hotel, she wallowed in guilt and misery—an activity she was eager to share.
“How can you live with it, Nicky? You could have helped.”
This was the night after we gave our depositions. We were sharing a couple of shots of single malt scotch in our suite after Pandora went down to sleep.
“You’re the one Alistair went to in his hour of need. Did you even try to help?”
I’d been prepared for this. I’d seen that accusation in Delia’s eyes since the morning she found his corpse.
“It was an accident,” I said, not letting niggling suspicions of murder get the best of me. “A horrible accident. He took more Mandrax than he should have. The consequences were tragic, but not intentional.”
Delia gave me a squinty-eyed stare, maybe trying to decide if I was deliberately lying. She looked tired and drawn with her make-up washed off. Even though she wasn’t much over thirty, I could see the face of the old woman she’d be some day.
“Alistair knew perfectly well he couldn’t handle more than one Mandrax. He was a bloody lightweight when it came to drugs.” She refilled her glass. “And he wanted to die. You know how often he tried. Obviously, I’ll regret our awful row until my dying day—but you were the person he went to at the end. His best friend. He had hardly any family. You know who he listed as his next of kin on his passport application? Me!”
This was odd, since I knew Alistair was deeply attached to his mother. I suspected he’d done that more to guilt-trip Delia than anything else.
But her accusations hurt. With suicide, survivors always beat themselves up with all the woulda coulda shoulda—and since my mom threw herself off a cliff when I was seven, I had a few personal issues in that department. But this wasn’t the time to share.
Instead I laughed and said, “Come on. Alistair was an English major. Where’s the suicide note?”
This was the argument I used to quell any lingering suspicions of my own. Even when he was staging one of his fake suicides, he’d write a damn note.
“Here was a man who wrote five pages to invite you for coffee, complete with ten obscure quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald. Do you really think he would have decided to make his final journey to the Great Beyond without any bon mots?”
I was probably too flip. I usually avoided drinking straight alcohol, so I was tipsy. It had seemed rude to order a room service highball when Delia had made a big fuss about getting the fancy scotch to reward ourselves for making it through our depositions.
Maybe it was because of the whiskey that Delia turned on me with such anger. I think she was on glass number three.
“You think suicide is funny, Nicky? You think it’s fucking funny? Thank god he didn’t leave a note. That’s the small blessing I can cling to.” She downed her glass and poured number four. “Let me tell you about suicide notes, Nicky.”
I’d been stifling yawns, and at that point I let one out, hoping to signal this wasn’t the time for a long story. But Delia was undeterred. She tearfully told me the tale of a girl she’d befriended while at school in Switzerland, who had jumped off an alp after getting pregnant—by a boy Delia was dating at the time. The pathetic creature had left a note accusing Delia of stealing her man and destroying her life.
And then apparently there was a young actor Delia had mentored a few years ago. She’d groomed him to audition for one of her husband’s plays, and when he didn’t get the part, he had stuck his head in a gas oven, leaving a note blaming Delia.
Grim stuff. It explained why Alistair’s suicide threats had wielded such power over her—the way they had with me. Survivor guilt is a bitch.
But nothing in her tragic tale changed what I knew about Alistair’s state of mind that night in Taft. I tried to say this, but Delia was on her fifth Laphroaig by then, so rational speech was wasted.
I went to bed and hoped I’d heard the last of the suicide nonsense, but a few nights later, there was another bottle of pricey scotch and more sulky guilt tripping. I had the sense not to drink with her that time, but the TV was in Delia’s room, and she grabbed me after she got bored with the Gunsmoke rerun we were watching.
“Do you know what they’re saying out there, Nicky?” Delia gestured at the window, where we had to keep the drapes tightly drawn, even in the daytime. “The tabloids? The gossip columns? Barbara fucking Walters, for god’s sake? They think I murdered him! They think I hit Alistair over the head and planted my pills on his body to make it look like suicide. The whole world is repeating that stupid lie.”
“They’re idiots,” I said, keeping one eye on Miss Kitty as she pleaded with Matt Dillon not to risk his life going out alone after that killer. Protecting her man. The way Delia thought I should have protected Alistair.
I turned to Delia. “The inquest will prove they’re a bunch of Bozos. Just wait.”
She collapsed onto her bed in tears. “What if it doesn’t, Nicky? Or what if he killed himself because I was sleeping with Sam and not him? Being married was my excuse, you see—why I couldn’t have sex with Alistair. I mean—I did once, sort of, but it was a mess, and I told him I could never do it again because of Thom. But when I started cheating on Thom with Sam, Alistair couldn’t bear it. That’s why we fought.”
She let out a sob. “Oh, Jesus, maybe I did kill him.”
I turned off the TV and stood by the bed, making what I hoped were calming noises as she wept into her pillow.
“You didn’t kill him, Delia. Neither did I. Maybe he took too many pills because he had such a bad headache. Or maybe he was trying to fake a suicide attempt to get your sympathy. But he accidentally took too many pills. I’m sure they’ll figure that out. This whole catastrophe is almost over. I heard one of the lawyers say the Taft coroner is holding the inquest next week. I’m sure after the autopsy report and our testimony it will be clear it was an accident and all those reporters will look like the mean-spirited vultures they are.”
Delia moaned and punched her pillow.
I tried to lighten the mood. “Besides, I heard somebody on the set say you can’t buy buzz like this. What was going to be a little art flick is suddenly going to do major box office. And the publicity is free.”
Delia rolled over, her eyes full of fury.
“Free publicity? I drove a friend to kill himself and I’m supposed to be happy because of the free publicity?”
I didn’t want to have this conversation again.
“It wasn’t suicide. English major. No note. Remember?”
Delia got up, filled another glass and handed it to me. Apparently drinking Laphroaig had become part of my job description.
“Maybe there was no note. But he was still carrying your letter, Nicky. It was the only thing in his pocket—the only bloody thing.”
Wow. That silly letter. I had no idea Alistair was still carting it around. How did she know? Had the lawyers told her something during her deposition?
Delia picked up her purse and brandished it like a weapon.
“Yes. That horrible letter you wrote last year. Alistair was still carrying it. That’s how much you hurt him.”
She opened the purse and pulled out a familiar crumpled envelope.
I stared at the thing, trying to figure out how she’d come by it.
“I thought it was his suicide note,” Delia spoke in an odd, hushed voice. “I didn’t want everybody reading it, because I thought he’d say awful things. Blame me.”
“You found it—on his body?”
Taking that letter had been either extraordinarily kind or extraordinarily stupid. Probably both.
“It was in the pocket of his suit jacket. I couldn’t bring myself to read it until we left Taft. Then, when I realized what it was—I didn’t want to give it to the police. It would only complicate things for you. I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you.”
The poor woman. So that’s why she wanted to get me drunk.
“Delia, you didn’t have to. It doesn’t mean anything.”
It was just a flirty note I wrote when he was living in England. I knew he’d hung on to it because he’d showed it to me when he came to Bryn Mawr to talk me into taking this job, but I figured he’d just kept it as a tool to manipulate me.
Delia’s eyes were full of accusation. “It meant something to him. A hell of a lot. You called him a fraud.” She refilled her own glass. “You said he was a phony. Right there in your prep-school-girl cursive. He told me he hung onto that letter to keep himself honest. He said you were the only person who ever saw through him. You saw through to his pain. That’s what he always told me. And it’s why he turned to you that night.”
Didn’t she know everybody saw through Alistair? What drew women to him wasn’t his pretentiousness, but the hint of tragedy beneath his absurd facade. In the letter, I’d called him “the most honest fraud I ever met” because he was such an obvious phony. I think he was flattered. He wrote back with one of his Fitzgerald quotes:
“There’s no such thing as a man willing to be honest. That would be like a blind man willing to see.”
But I didn’t see the point of going into all that when Delia had taken such a major risk to keep me from looking like a bad guy. So I put on my Nanny-wants-you-to-be-sensible-now face and said:
“Alistair didn’t ask me for help that night. He asked for Mandrax. He had a bad headache and wanted a drug to make it go away. Not just any drug—the best drug. He knew you had it, so he went to your room. He took too much. It’s tragic and we’ll miss him, but please stop looking for somebody to blame, OK?”
It wasn’t OK. Delia’s face went hard.
“You fucking killed him, Nicky,” she said in a horrible whisper. “You were his only friend and you let him down.”
I could have shouted at her. I could have cried. But instead I reacted the way I usually do to outrageous verbal abuse—with my family I’ve had lots of practice—I pretended she hadn’t said it. I ignored the words, faked a yawn and went to bed without drinking the damned scotch.
But after that, I made sure I went to bed as soon as Pandora was asleep, and I didn’t even turn on the TV. Of course, I couldn’t help wondering if Delia was right—if I could have saved Alistair that night. But I didn’t want to let her know she had planted such painful seeds of doubt. To her—and all those damned reporters—I presented an impenetrable wall of sunny cheer for the rest of our stay in Los Angeles.
Which wasn’t long. A few days later Guido came barreling into our suite in a state of fist-waving rage.
“That bitch!” he said, doing marvelously explosive things with the ‘b.’ “The mother of Alistair Milbourne. She has made an injunction against us. Our depositions will not be honored. They say they cannot surmise the cause of Mr. Milbourne’s death without our famous faces in the court. We must appear at the inquisition tomorrow. We are returning to Taft, my ladies. God help us.”
So off we flew, in the studio’s private jet—most of us echoing Guido’s request for divine help. At least we didn’t go back to the Knight’s Rest. This time we were deposited at The Sunset Motor Hotel, apparently the poshest place Taft had to offer.
Unfortunately, a sizable battalion of the media forces were there to meet us. They were camped out in the parking lot of the Sunset—and most of the other establishments along Kern Avenue, in all that heat, poor things. I almost felt sorry for them.
But the paparazzi and Delia’s guilt-trippy sulks were about fade to mild background noise—because the “inquisition” was scheduled for nine the next morning. There, we would all be confronted with the woman who had apparently bamboozled half the lawyers in Central California and halted the production of a film by the great Guido Malatesta: one-time airline stewardess, failed actress, professional mistress and grieving mother extraordinaire, Glenda Gilroy Milbourne Stanford Keener McTigh—the woman Alistair called “The Gorgon.”