“Miss LaRoche?”
“Am-scray,” said the movie star from behind her giant menu in the Roosevelt’s dining room. “Keep bothering me and I’ll have you put out on your caboose.”
“Miss LaRoche,” Becky persisted, “I believe I’m the person you came here to see.”
“Well, I believe—and believe you me—that you’re nothing like what I came to see.” She raised her fingers over the menu and snapped them for the maître d’.
“You’re hoping to see Stuart Newman, aren’t you?”
Rosemary lowered the menu a tentative two inches. “And how the hell would you know that?”
“Because I sent that note to the set,” said Becky. “I mean his note, about you.”
“Siddown,” said Rosemary, closing the menu at last, but refusing to look her new lunch partner in the face.
“I’m his colleague,” said Becky.
Rosemary guffawed. “Is that what they’re callin’ it these days?” More encouragingly, she waved off the just-summoned maître d’.
Becky pressed forward. “I’m hoping that you’ll accept me in his place.”
Rosemary hated being puzzled. In his place? As in “alongside” him? Had ’Phat Harris so misunderstood the nature of her hint about a “third party” that he’d sent this moist little frail out here instead of Newman and another gentleman?
“Listen, honey, you’re a little confused. If you’re lookin’ to play field hockey with the girls, I can give you Miss Garbo’s phone number. Now where’s Mr. Newman?”
“He’s in New York,” said Becky, who nervously munched a roll while trying to explain just how she came to be here.
Rosemary waited for her to finish the story before saying, quietly, “You took all this upon yourself?”
Becky nodded, hoping the star would admire her moxie, maybe see her as the kind of girl Dorothy Gish often played.
“Of all the goddamned stupid nerve! Take your mitts off that roll! You’re not gettin’ so much as a cup of coffee here!” Only when she saw that other diners were turning around did the star replace the roar with a hiss. “Exactly what did you expect to accomplish?”
It was a question Becky almost hadn’t dared ask herself, so new was the thrill of ambition—and accomplishment—that had been filling her. Over the past two weeks she had played the Ouija board with Blanche Sweet, gone for drives in the desert with Dorothy Gish, and pried several damning admissions about the actresses’ censorship problems from a man in Will Hays’s office. The article she was trying to write needed to be a grand slam if she didn’t want to get knocked back to doing squibs on Nelson’s Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia. Her confidence had been rising with each longhand draft composed in her room upstairs; she reminded herself that even the Spirit of St. Louis had bumped the runway three times before lifting off.
But right now, face-to-face with this implacable siren, she could feel her propeller starting to sputter. Her hopes of turning a little miracle for Harris were headed into the drink, and she had no maneuvers left to execute. She had even considered calling Howard Kenyon, but Dorothy had assured her that the star’s ex had “no more pull than he used to have push” with Rosemary.
Looking into the actress’s eyes, Becky knew she’d better give up. Back in New York she’d simply have to take a deep breath and tell Harris she’d done her best; then she’d go shopping for an Easter dress, something less jeune fille than the Pinafore loaner she had on now.
Rosemary was back behind her menu, snarling once again. “I’ll count to three and you’d better be lost.”
Becky could feel her right foot lifting, getting ready to beat the first step of a retreat. “You know,” she said, “Stuart’s job depends on your doing this story.”
“Four, five, six,” said Rosemary.
“He’s more handsome than ever,” Becky added, as she finally stood up.
Rosemary’s knuckles tightened to an extreme whiteness against the menu—out of desire or impatience, Becky couldn’t tell. But when nothing further happened, she had no choice other than to leave the dining room.
Back up in her room, she began to pack, laying a program from Grauman’s Chinese beneath several writing tablets and a straw hat. Tomorrow she would start the long journey home aboard the Chief to Chicago, passing through all that western territory she still had trouble imagining as the scene of Cuddles’ boyhood. On the trip out she’d tried to picture his younger self as a merry little fossil, not so much petrified as suspended, awaiting reanimation, inside one of the rocky canyons’ geologic layers. She had written him twice and cabled once from out here, all to no response. Daniel, by contrast, had written every other day. She now put the rubber-banded stash of his letters under the straw hat, remembering as she did how one of them contained a list of things she should be sure to see at the Huntington Library. Between all her outings with Blanche and Dorothy, she’d never got around to going.
The Roosevelt kept a big Kelvinator at the end of each hall. At 3:00 P.M. Becky was taking some fresh pineapple from it and thinking about how hard she’d find going back to her leaky icebox on Seventeenth Street. It was then she heard the telephone ringing in her room. She hurried back down the hall, assuming the front desk had just received her tickets from the Oldcastle travel agent.
“Amazing what they can do with electricity these days,” said the voice on the other end.
“Cuddles!” It was the clearest long-distance connection she’d ever been on.
“Ah, those crystal-clear sibilants. Norman must have pulled a few strings with his old pals at AT&T. Got our lines routed under nothing but widows’ porches from Midtown to Malibu. Pretty quiet, no? So how are you? It’s almost quitting time here.”
“You sound—” said Becky, hesitantly.
“Sober?”
“I didn’t want to use the word.”
“It’s the war footing we’re on. Concentrates the mind. ‘Don’t give up the Shep’—that’s our slogan. He’s the Rosetta corncob at this point.”
“I’ve seen the papers.” The Los Angeles Examiner had picked up the story, and even run news of Gianni’s conviction in a sidebar summary of Bandbox’s woes. “Any more news?”
“Yeah, actually,” said Cuddles. “From a surprising source.”
“What is it? Who from?” Becky was surprised by the avidity of her own questions.
“It’ll take too long to tell on the horn. ’Phat says we’ve got to act like we’re down to the budget’s last nickel. I’ll wait and give it to you in person. When I get there.”
“When you get here?”
“Book yourself another week in that pleasure palace.”
“Cuddles.” She tried, with a stern tone, to snuff whatever desperate romantic gesture he might be planning.
“This is business,” he informed her. “I won’t even stay on the same floor.”
“On what basis am I supposed to extend my stay here? I’m done with Blanche and Dorothy, and I struck out completely with that hateful LaRoche.”
“Well, I guess she’s not a lez.”
“She thinks I’m a lez.”
“If you are, you’re lez majesté.”
“Lez change the subject.”
“Lez misbehave. No, scratch that. We have business. Expect me by the nineteenth at the latest.”
Becky sighed. “That’s a long way to travel just to read my Blanche-and-Dorothy piece. Which may actually be good. Oh, gosh, Cuddles, it’s got to be good.”
“We can edit out by the pool.”
“Will you stop? Listen, I’m happy to hear your voice, even with the practical joke. And I will see you by the nineteenth. At the latest. Since that’s when I’ll be back in the office.”
“No. You’ve got to stay put.”
“You’re beginning to exasperate me, Mr. H. I’m going to say toodle-oo now.”
“No, you’re going to find Shep. Next week. With me. Stay where you are, because you’re already getting warm.”
He went on to reveal just enough to make Becky realize he wasn’t kidding, that he’d be coming out on a train headed in the opposite direction from the one Oldcastle’s travel agent was still booking her on. In the end, she could only say okay.
After he’d hung up, she stared out her window of the Roosevelt into the blazing sun. And then she went downstairs to extend her reservation. Cuddles’ word had always been his bond. Sometimes the bond turned out to be Confederate—worth only its weight in sentiment—but she couldn’t say no to whatever long shot he was trying to play, not when for so many months she’d been urging him to play any shot at all.
Three thousand miles away, Cuddles, too, was staring out the window, not into the sun, which in New York had gone down, but at the steel shell of the Chanin Building, now risen past the top of the Commodore Hotel and visible from even the Graybar. Its rapid ascent seemed a reminder to make haste, and after another moment Cuddles got himself down to Grand Central to make his reservations for Los Angeles. He’d take the Twentieth Century to Chicago and, from there, a Chief to L.A. His departure from here a couple of days from now would occasion no collegial sendoff; he was determined to keep absolutely mum about what he’d learned.
Which was this: Max had told him, when he asked what Rothstein tended to do with bystanders who’d stumbled into his more delicate business affairs, about several places where the gang kept people on ice before returning them to New York or sending them to a more permanent nowhere. He’d mentioned a farmhouse in New England and a ranch in California—“There’s corpses under the copse, stiffs beneath the sand”—while Cuddles tried to seem no more than moderately interested, withholding what he’d learned from the judge about their little pitcher and his possibly big ears. If he sent Max down the wrong path in search of Shep, that would truly be the end of Harris & Houlihan. But if his secrecy led to a surprise heroic payoff in the eyes of BW? Well, then, Shep really might be the Rosetta cob.
Late Friday afternoon, joining half the staff inside ’Phat’s office to toast the absent, just-convicted Gianni at a wake that felt more mick than mama mia, Cuddles had gone back to his best source. Whisking Daisy aside—who ever was more whiskable?—Cuddles asked if any of those “messengers” had ever said anything about a New England farmhouse or a California ranch. Maybe the judge himself had been threatened with a sojourn at one of them?
No, Daisy had said, after a bit of cogitation. But one of the messengers, an especially well-built man, had recently arrived at Beekman Place with a new tan, which, he told Daisy, had been soaked up in California. He’d also mentioned horses.
Cuddles had then asked her if she could arrange to see this fellow again, quickly. On Sunday she managed that, while the judge was visiting ninety-one-year-old Ma Gilfoyle at the Little Sisters of Mercy home in Jackson Heights.
And this morning Daisy had come into Cuddles’ office, practically purring: “Go west, young man.”
“You’re two generations late,” he’d replied. But Daisy’s tryst with the tanned specimen of Rothstein’s muscle-squad had produced amazingly precise directions to a sort of half-working, half-dude ranch in the San Rafael Valley. Cuddles had to wonder why Daisy had wasted her war years on the late Count DiDonna, when she could have been Uncle Sam’s own Mata Hari. But he just thanked her, and figured that her Sunday-afternoon assignation had been its own reward.
Until she’d shyly added a request. “I won’t ask what this is about,” she whispered, blowing her perfumed breath toward Cuddles, “but if what I told you is useful, well—could you see if there might be something in it for the judge? A way to get the dogs called off?”