At approximately the same time that Tom was leaving the records building, Wanda Belkins, now feeling and acting less than confident, was slowly edging toward Grove Pictures’ massive, seventy-five foot deep swimming pool. Backwards.
The specially designed pool was the one and only of its depth and length in the world. It could easily accommodate up to a hundred swimmers at one time as well as a complete underwater film crew. Along with dramatic backdrops such as underwater rock structures and myriad canyons and peaks.
Most recently, it had been temporarily appropriated by the War Department in order to make a training film for the U.S. Navy.
The purpose of this film was to demonstrate the proper procedure for escaping a sinking submarine.
Needless to say, Emerson Waldie hadn’t been too happy about having a real submarine lowered into his beautiful pool which had cost a whopping one hundred thousand dollars to build.
“Who the hell do you people think you are, coming in here and trying to take over part of my studio?” he’d hollered when first approached about the use of his pool.
“We’re the people who can take over your entire studio for the duration of the war if we so wish,” the War Department representative had calmly replied.
But now the training film was made and the U.S. Navy and their effing submarine were gone and the pool was drained of water. Grove Pictures’ swimming sensation, Alexis Lee, for whom the pool was built, was on leave. She was going to have a baby and as a result of her absence, no ‘“water” movies were being planned for at least six months.
It had been rumored around Hollywood that Emerson Waldie had given Alexis an additional three months off, not out of generosity, but so that she could train the newborn infant to swim. It was his express desire that Alexis and the baby would appear together in her comeback film. This, according to Waldie, was something that would certainly get moviegoers excited.
However, that movie wasn’t going to be made until well into 1943 and right now, on the darkened soundstage, Wanda was getting scared. She hadn’t yet reached the pool when the man following her accidentally kicked something.
Wanda turned sharply toward the sound. She couldn’t see anyone, even when she squinted her eyes, but she sensed she was in danger. She was suddenly gripped by fear.
“Who’s there?” she cried out.
The answer came in the form of Marcus Wood. He stepped out of the shadows and into the eerie reddish light from the exit sign. He moved purposefully in the direction of the young woman.
“Stay away from me,” she warned. “You come one step closer and I’ll scream my head off.”
“Be my guest, Maggie,” Wood quietly replied, smiling. “Nobody will hear you.”
“What do you mean, Maggie?” Wanda asked. “I’m Wanda Belkins.”
“Sure you are, Maggie,” Wood said agreeably. “And I just so happen to be General Douglas MacArthur. By the way, Maggie, where on earth did you pick up that horribly screechy voice? It’s absolutely appalling.”
“I told you, mister, I’m not Maggie,” Wanda insisted. “What do you want?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Wood said with an air of nonchalance. “Just your life.” With each step he took forward, Wanda took one back. She was now a mere six or eight feet from the edge of the empty pool.
“I swear to you,” she said, “I’m not the person you think I am. I’m not Maggie Graym. I’m just made up to look like her. Emerson Waldie wants me to replace her. So he had the makeup people give me the same look. You gotta believe me.”
Wood watched the girl’s progress. She was just a few feet from the big concrete hole in the floor. This was terrific, he thought. Fortuitous to the extreme. He could kill Maggie Graym without having to as much as touch her. Her death would look like an accident which is exactly the way he wanted it to look.
As had been the case with Dorothy Ennismore, it simply would not “do” for anyone to even suspect that Maggie had been murdered. His aim was that the ordinary soldier, the man on the front line, feel great loss and nothing else. Any hint of foul play was certain to replace a soldier’s grief and depression with a need for revenge. Revenge had a strength all its own that made men fight all the more furiously. And that, Wood thought as he strode very quickly towards Wanda, was contrary to the whole point of the exercise.
Wanda, seeing Wood almost upon her, turned to run and then, realizing her mistake, tried to stop in time. Her scream was too brief to be loud.
“So long, Maggie,” Wood said as he walked over to the side of the pool and looked down at the look-alike, obviously dead. She’d met the bottom of the pool face first and lay sprawled like a broken doll.
Wood was feeling something very close to euphoria. Ten months earlier, in January of 1942, he’d felt the same thing when the news reached him confirming Dorothy’s plane as having crashed just outside of Denver.
In what he’d considered to be a performance of Academy Award calibre, he had wept copious tears and had then insisted on accompanying the bereaved widower, Bax McClain, his squash court and polo pal, along with the rest of the search party to the crash site. He wanted to make sure there was nothing to indicate that this might have been an act of sabotage. And there was nothing. The impact had fairly pulverized the TWA DC-3 so much so that the largest piece of wreckage found was less than a foot long.
But the whole operation had turned out disappointingly. Ennismore had been a great star, although not one who’d as yet established herself as a military favorite. She was laid to rest and, in the face of all that a nation at war had to contend with, pretty well forgotten. Wood had planned that his next victim be a true favorite with soldiers, sailors and marines as well as civilians.
Standing at the side of the pool and looking down at the body, he felt he’d succeeded in doing just that. He was also thrilled this assassination had gone so well, so smoothly, although he was baffled as to why Maggie had protested so strongly that she wasn’t Maggie.
Oh, well, he thought. It didn’t really matter. All that really mattered when it came right down to it was that Maggie Graym was dead.
Now he could concentrate on some of the other projects he’d been neglecting. One of them was the planned derailment of the Hollywood Victory Caravan, a train from which important stars such as Hedy Lamarr, Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunne, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Claudette Colbert, Dorothy Lamour and William Powell sold victory bonds at whistle stops across America. To kill them all in one fell swoop would be a coup greater than Wood could imagine.
He also had his east coast people looking at ways to rig the furnace at the Stage Door Canteen in New York so that an “accidental” explosion would take even more entertainers and a huge number of military to their deaths.
And, of course, there was the need to eliminate the highers-up such as Mayer, Goldwyn and Zanuck. He considered these people the Reich’s real enemies.
Lastly, in his position with the MPIB, he’d had access to many of the facts Washington had wanted suppressed. He’d been collecting all these nasty facts about the war and compiling them into a book called Secrets Washington Doesn’t Want You To Know which he was planning to publish. Anonymously, of course. Then he would publish a sequel called Secrets Hollywood Doesn’t Want You To Know in which he would dish the dirt on the stars and the studios. Together, these two volumes would most certainly lower morale across the country.
There was a lot of work to be done and so few hours in any given day to do it all.