“You’d like me to what?” Maggie asked.
Tom Driscoll stepped into Maggie’s dressing room without waiting to be asked and had then closed the door firmly behind him. He didn’t want anyone but Maggie within hearing distance when he repeated his request.
“I’d like you to hide someone at the house you own over in Malibu,” Tom said again. “He’s the young kid you’ve been hearing about on the radio, the one who jumped off the bus taking him and all those other folks to the internment camp out in the desert. I’ve got him lying low in a 24-hour movie house and I need a permanent place for him to stay.”
Maggie looked at Tom with a look of incredulity on her face. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” she said.
“Look at it this way,” Tom said confidently, “you’re the one who said you wouldn’t be happy until you paid your debt to me. So all I’m doing is giving you your chance.”
Despite Tom’s apparent cockiness, which irritated Maggie no end, she detected a certain seriousness in his manner.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re asking me to harbor an escaped evacuee at my house in Malibu, someone every cop in L.A. is on the lookout for, right?”
“Right.”
This had to be one of the craziest ideas Maggie had ever heard, even crazier than some of the things Emerson Waldie had dreamed up for her when it came to promoting Grove Pictures and the movies she was making there.
“How did you know that I had a house in Malibu?” she asked suspiciously.
“I saw it on the Movietone News. There was that short with you driving through the studio gates and the announcer saying: Miss Graym likes to get away to her Malibu hideaway every possible chance she can.” Tom recited this in the same manner as the announcer. “And there are a few other things I know about you,” he continued.
“Such as?” Maggie lit a Lucky and exhaled the smoke through her nostrils.
“Such as the fact that you’re one hundred percent against the internment camps,” Tom said.
“Oh, really?”
“And that you personally went to your boss, Emerson Waldie, and asked him to use whatever influence he had on Roosevelt and the government in order to stop these evacuations.”
“Don’t tell me that you saw that on the Movietone News, too,” Maggie said.
“No, my friend Erne was waiting outside Waldie’s office late one night to see him about something or other and he overheard the entire conversation. And he told me about it. Said you did a tremendous job trying to get Waldie’s help but that Waldie wouldn’t budge.”
“Your friend Erne has a big mouth.”
“Had,” Tom corrected her.
“Had?”
Tom changed the subject. “Look, are you going to help this guy or not?”
Maggie thought about what it was Tom was asking her to do. She felt that by granting him the favor, it would free her of any debt she might owe him.
After all, he did save her from the Hollywood Canteen rapist. And he did save her from being splattered all over the set during the Ferris wheel incident.
Of course, doing this presented an enormous risk for her and she knew what would happen regarding her career and her future and her life, in general, if she were caught. But all this was a small price to pay when measured against what she would personally achieve if she was able to pull off what was being asked of her.
For one thing, it would be her way of helping to right a terrible wrong in terms of what this country was forcing upon so many of its loyal citizens.
Maggie had, indeed, been one of the very few in the Hollywood community who’d made a statement in defense of the people who’d done nothing, absolutely nothing, to receive such harsh and unreasonable treatment at the hands of the government.
Down near San Diego where Maggie had come from and where she’d grown up, many of the people she’d come into contact with were of Japanese descent.
At least a quarter of her classmates all through grade school and high school, and quite a few of her close friends, had been Neisi—born in her sleepy little American hometown.
It was incredible to think that they had all been rounded up and shipped to unheard-of places in the Californian desert as well as to northern California and Utah and Nevada, even Arkansas. Packed onto buses and trains, onto the back of trucks in some cases, with not much more than a suitcase or two and leaving everything else behind.
Maggie mashed out her cigarette and lit another one. She knew she’d have to give this irritating stuntman some sort of an answer. It kind of surprised her that Tom was so concerned with the problem. She had no idea that a guy like him could really care about these people and what they were going through. But apparently he did care, and this made Maggie curious as to what other virtues he might be hiding. She was even beginning to forget how rude he’d been to her.
“Okay” Tom said impatiently, shattering Maggie’s softening thoughts toward him. “Are you gonna put your money where your mouth is or are you just another empty-headed Hollywood dame who likes to shoot her mouth off?”
“I don’t go back on my word,” Maggie said, annoyed all over again. “Just tell me when you’re planning to bring the boy to Mailbu and I’ll be there.”
“That’s easy. I can have him at your place just after midnight.”
“Fine,” Maggie said. “And after that, I hope I won’t have to see any more of you. “
“You can be sure of that,” Tom said.
“Fine,” Maggie replied.
“Yeah, fine,” Tom agreed and after going over the details of their plan, left.
Shortly after, Maggie informed the producer of the film she was working on that she wasn’t feeling well. And while chang- ing out of her costume into a pink angora sweater, a neck scarf with tiny red hearts on it, slacks, and a pair of ankle-strap wedgies, she remembered she was supposed to pose for a publicity shot later that afternoon that called for her to stand on the wing ofaB-17.
Postponing that, Maggie got into her powder-blue Lincoln Continental convertible for the drive to Malibu.
She had made a decision. Without discussing it with Tom, she planned to hide Douglas Tanaka at her house for the duration of the war if need be. Tom was going to collect Douglas from the movie house and deliver him to her by midnight.
She realized that if news of her actions ever got out, she’d be considered a traitor by everybody and that her career in Hollywood would be forever over.
Not only that, but she knew she would be arrested by the FBI and probably sent to prison. No doubt they’d compare her to Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally.
But Maggie wasn’t dwelling on those possibilities. They were minor penalties in comparison with all the good she would be doing in helping to safeguard the freedom of these wronged American citizens and their families.
If she could only help one person, it would be worth it. Driving past the swimming pool soundstage, she saw the studio police wave her to a standstill. It occurred to her they’d been tipped off about Douglas Tanaka.
“Miss Graym,” one of the cops said falteringly. “We thought you were...that you were...”
“Were what?” Maggie asked, not knowing what to expect from these policemen who, by their expressions and actions, seemed not only surprised, but shocked to see her.
“We thought you were...well...you know...dead,” the cop finally explained.
“If you mean as far as the box office, yeah, that last picture was a stinker,” Maggie joked.
The cop didn’t laugh. Obviously this was no laughing matter. “We found a body on the swimming pool set and we thought it was yours.”
“A body?”
“Yeah. A young woman. Looks just like you. I mean, you’d have a hard time telling the difference. At least we did.”
Maggie opened the door of her car and got out. “May I see it, the body?”
“Are you sure you want to do that, Miss Graym?” the cop asked.
“I’m sure,” Maggie said.
“It’s right over there,” the cop said. He escorted Maggie across the street to where an ambulance was parked. Several men were carrying a stretcher to the vehicle.
“Has Mr. Waldie been informed about this?” Maggie asked.
“Yes,” the cop said. “In fact, he was just here. Left a few minutes before you arrived.”
“Did he identify the body?”
“Well, not officially,” the cop said. “He just sort of stomped his foot a whole lot of times and let out with a few curse words. That was about it.”
The stretcher with the covered body was now being held before Maggie by the two attendants. The cop lifted the white sheet covering the girl’s battered face.
“Oh, the poor kid,” Maggie said. She recognized the dead girl as the look-alike she’d bumped into in the makeup department earlier that day.
She also recognized the fact that Emerson Waldie was probably going nuts right this minute seeing as how his plot to replace her had been prematurely terminated by this terrible accident.
But that, she thought, was Emerson Waldie’s problem, not hers. Maggie took one last look at the young, misguided girl on the stretcher.
“Does anyone know how it happened?”
“We don’t know anything yet,” the cop said. “Looks like she just walked into the empty pool in the dark. But one thing’s for sure, and that’s how glad we are that it wasn’t you who fell in, Miss Graym.”
“Thanks,” Maggie said, walking back to her car. While getting in, she recalled something that had happened about an hour earlier. When she had run into Marcus Wood. He had acted in such a strange way when he saw her.
She remembered what he’d said to her. Something like: “So that wasn’t you.” And the look on his face, the way he just seemed to glare at her. There had been no doubt about it. Maggie had definitely felt threatened.
And yet, there couldn’t be any real reason for her feeling this way. Marcus had always been so nice to her. Going back to the very start of her career. Whenever she’d had a problem she couldn’t work out for herself, and there had been many, she would always go to Marcus. And he had always been there for her, giving her the benefit of his wonderful wisdom and strength.
She decided to drop the whole issue about Marcus for the moment. There was no telling why he’d acted that way. Who knows, she thought, maybe he had indigestion from the Spam which Waldie had so patriotically ordered everyone to eat in the commissary.
She started the Continental’s powerful V-12 engine and passed the ambulance carrying the young woman to the morgue. She could see it in her rear view mirror as she drove toward the main gate. What she couldn’t see was the car that was directly behind the ambulance, the car that would soon be directly behind her own, following her as she drove along Melrose to Sunset Boulevard, the latter being a circuitous and somewhat dangerous road.
Friends thought she was mad buying a house all the way out near Malibu Point. The journey, they said, was enough to put anyone off. But to Maggie, getting out of Los Angeles, when she had enough ration tickets for gas, kept her sane. She wasn’t the only movie star who felt this way. A small community of movie people was springing up in the “colony” as it was called. But on the whole, Malibu was peaceful and quiet, two things Maggie loved most about the place.
The trip was arduous. It always took about two hours, at times on unpaved, one lane roads, but she would have driven twice as long just to have that peace and quiet.