It was almost two in the morning when I stepped out of the automatic elevator onto my floor in the Olmstead. The injuries from Mitch’s thoughtful beating had settled into one continuous ache that covered my body from my neck to my hips. I pulled out my keys, and separated the apartment door key from the others on the ring. Halfway down the hall a phone was ringing. Its shrill insistent call was the only sound on the floor, a nasty, unwelcome sound at this time of night that could only mean bad news, somebody died, you’re wanted at the hospital. When I got closer, I could hear that it was my phone. It was the same noise I had walked away from nearly five hours ago; as though it had been ringing the entire time I was gone.
I got the door opened and crossed to the phone without turning on the lights. “Foster.”
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all night.” The accent was thicker in his panic.
“Well you have me now, Miguel. What is it?”
“Miss Rose, she’s not well.”
“Was she ever?”
“No, you don’t understand, she wants to die. She cut her wrists.”
I let out my breath like I’d been thumped on the chest, and I didn’t have to imagine what that felt like either. “When did this happen?”
“I tried calling you many hours ago. At dinner time at least.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“She wouldn’t have wanted...” He trailed off.
No, she probably wouldn’t. They couldn’t have helped much anyway, and they might have taken the act as an admission of guilt. But surely someone could have helped. Anyone could have more than me. “How is she now?” I asked
“She’s sleeping. I gave her some pills. I’ve been keeping her pills away from her for many months now. The doctor didn’t think it was safe for her to have them. But I didn’t know what else to do...” He was getting worked up again.
My mind was racing. Something wasn’t making sense. “Keep an eye on her. I’ll be right there.”
“Thank you. I’ll leave the door unlocked so you don’t have to ring.”
I hadn’t had to ring once yet, but I didn’t bother pointing that out. I hung up and went back out into the hall.
The streets were mostly empty at that time of night. The city’s neon still flashed and blinked, reflected in chrome façades and plate glass store windows, even as the stores themselves were dark. In the residential district, all of the house lights were out, giving the impression of an abandoned city whose traffic lights flashed red and green for no one. I made the turn onto Highlawn Drive and parked in the driveway this time. Unlike the neighbors, the Rosenkrantz house was lit up with what appeared to be every light they had.
Once more Miguel opened the door for me before I could reach for the knob. “She’s sleeping still, upstairs in her room.”
“Where’s Mr. Rosenkrantz?”
Miguel shook his head. “I don’t know. He hasn’t been home since morning. At dinnertime, Miss Rose started to get very excited. I tried to call you. Where were you?”
“Out. Give me the rest.”
“She started shouting. Then she locked herself in her room. After a time, she quieted down, and at first I thought this was good, but when I stopped hearing any sounds at all... I went in with another key.”
“Did she know you had another key?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“She was on the floor in the bathroom with her wrists cut. There was blood, but not so much. I bandaged her arms and carried her to her bed, gave her the pills, and I’ve been calling you ever since.”
“When was the last time you checked on her?”
“Every ten minutes.”
It sounded believable. It also sounded like a headstrong movie star who needed drama in her life as well as in her pictures. Knox had mentioned that she was prone to moods, and I had seen that. But no one had said anything about suicide.
“Take me up,” I said.
We went up the staircase opposite the one that led to Rosenkrantz’s study, along the catwalk hallway, past two closed doors to a third that had been left ajar. Miguel knocked enough to satisfy propriety and then opened the door the rest of the way.
The only source of light here was a pair of wall sconces made to look like lit candles in brass candelabras. There was one to either side of the four-poster bed. The soft glare from each shone on the green patterned wallpaper, turning the wall at those spots yellow. There was a nice chandelier in the center of the ceiling that wasn’t doing anything but looking pretty. An open door just past the bed was the bathroom.
She was on the side of the bed nearest us, propped up on throw pillows of varying sizes, all with gilt tassels and somber colors except for the pillow just below her head, a normal pillow in a normal white pillowcase, good for sleeping no matter your station. The bedclothes had been pulled back on that side of the bed to form a nice triangle of exposed sheet. She hadn’t pulled the covers back over herself. Her right hand lay on the white cloth. A handkerchief had been wrapped around her wrist, and I had no doubt there was one on the other wrist as well. The whole scene looked like a sick room out of a movie, and I wondered if wherever Chloë Rose was it always looked like a movie.
Miguel went to her side. “Miss Rose, Miss Rose, it’s Mr. Foster. He’s here to help.” She didn’t stir. He looked back at me with open honest eyes filled with worry. It was plain that he was in love with her. It was a bad thing for him to be.
I stepped past him and took her right hand. I turned it over and unwound the white handkerchief from her wrist. Either she hadn’t been very serious about dying or she didn’t know what she was doing. There were two jagged cuts across her wrist, not up it, and they intersected as though she had been unsure of the first one and tried again. They were more than superficial, but they wouldn’t need stitches. The blood had already clotted, and there was hardly more than a small rusty stain on the handkerchief. I reached across her for the other one just to make sure. It was the same.
As I replaced her left hand, her eyes flickered, and she said something in French in the dull dreamy voice of the drugged. She said a little bit more, and then opened her eyes again, this time enough to maybe see me. She switched to English then. “I’m not dead.”
“Did you hope to be?” I said.
She closed her eyes and licked her lips. “Could I please have some water?”
Miguel went around the bed to the bathroom. There was the sound of the sink going on and then off, and he brought the glass to her. He had to put it in her hand, and once he did she just held it, resting the glass on the bed, making no effort to actually drink.
“If you want to kill yourself by slitting your wrists,” I said, “you need to cut along the veins up your forearm. That’s how you’ll bleed out. Slashing across your wrists will just hurt more than anything else.”
“I wondered,” she said, “why there was so little blood.”
“Why do you want to kill yourself? Because you’ve got an alcoholic husband and some policemen weren’t very nice to you?”
Miguel shifted behind me, and I knew that he wasn’t happy with the way I was talking to her. Well, he had called me, so I was what he was going to get.
She shook her head back and forth on the pillow, slowly.
“You want to go to a hospital?” I said. “You think that’ll get you away from all of this?”
“I don’t want a hospital,” she said, a petulant child. “I don’t want anything. I don’t want to be alive.”
“You can quit playing Madame Bovary,” I told her. “Nobody really thinks you have anything to do with this murder. The police just want to catch a few headlines.”
“It’s not about the police.” Her voice was stronger now. It sounded more like a cornered animal than an injured one.
“Maybe at Merton Stein they like it when you pull your prima donna act, it makes them feel like they’ve got a real star, but out here, it’s not getting you anything.”
“You think this is an act?”
“Mister Foster,” Miguel said behind me.
“Yeah. I think you’re feeling upstaged by a dead starlet who was having an affair with your husband. You’ve got to remind everyone you’re around, but all you got was a Mexican and me.”
“Mister Foster,” Miguel said again, putting his hand on my elbow now.
“No,” Chloë Rose said, throwing the water glass. She only had enough strength to get it a foot or so away from the bed. The water splashed my pant leg. She was shaking her head. “No. No, no, no. I have no one anymore. My mother...my father... Now my husband, too. I have nobody! Nobody wants me.”
Miguel left then. Probably going back to his stash of medicine.
“What about your adoring fans? Hell, I’m waiting for your next picture.”
She just kept shaking her head.
Miguel was back then with another glass of water and some pills cupped in his palm. I held up my hand to prevent him from going forward. “She’s had enough of that.”
She pushed what covers were on her off and stood, but she was unsteady on her feet and she fell against me. “Hold me,” she said. I put my arms around her. It hurt like hell.
Our faces were inches apart. Her eyes were desperate, urgent with need. Did she want me to kiss her? With her husband missing and her doting houseboy watching?
I held her away from me, one hand on each of her arms. “I know a private place,” I said. “The Enoch White Clinic. I had some dealings with them a year or so back when I was working a missing persons and the missing person turned up...unwell. They’re good, professional, real doctors.”
“You think I need to go to hospital?”
“You think you’re fine here?”
She rested her head against my chest. “I’m not fine anywhere.”
“I’ll ring them right up. They’ve got people on call any time of the day or night. I bet they can be here within the hour.”
She looked back up at me, and now she was scared.
“It’ll be all right,” I said, although I didn’t know if it would.
“But what happened to Mandy...”
“The police are looking into it. Sometimes they surprise you and do their job.”
“You said the police only want headlines, not killers.”
Throwing my own words back at me. I was as crazy as she was to go on talking to her. But up close like that she smelled so nice. A man could get distracted by that.
She straightened a fold in my shirt, studying the weave intensely. “If you would look into it, I would feel so much better. Everyone else seems out for themselves. I’m frightened.”
“I’ve been warned away from this thing by more people in more ways than I would care to list.”
She looked up at me without moving her head. Her eyes glistened, just like they did at that crucial moment in all of her pictures. “Please,” she said, breathing the word so I could feel it on my lips.
I bent down and mashed my lips against hers. It wasn’t right, but I did it anyway, and I won’t say I’m sorry. When we broke apart, I said, “Why does Daniel Merton want to buy your horse?”
Her brow crumpled, and she took a step back, both hands still on my chest. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
She shook her head, confused, and I could see the hysteria setting back in.
Miguel said, “Mr. Foster, I think you should leave.”
We ignored that.
“When did he give you the horse,” I said.
She still shook her head. “Four months ago, maybe five.”
“Does he often give you things like that?”
“On occasion. When a picture does well. He does it with all of his actresses. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Has he ever asked for a present he’s given you back before?”
She pressed her lips together, and shook her head. Maybe this time it meant no. “I don’t understand, why are you asking me these things?”
“Miss Rose,” Miguel said.
“Forget it,” I said, and then I leaned in, and she met me, and I kissed her again, smelling flowers and something behind the flowers that was really her.
This time when we parted, she said, “Promise me you’ll help Mandy.”
“I’ll try,” I said, because I was a fool.
She collapsed in my arms, going limp, and I struggled to hold her. I leaned her back so that she sat down on the bed, and then I turned back to Miguel, indicating that he should step in and take over. He wouldn’t look at me. He took her arm and leaned down for her legs, helping her back onto the bed. There was a phone on the night table and I picked it up to call the clinic. They did the bulk of their business giving people the cure, booze and dope, but they handled all variety of mental disorders. I couldn’t tell if Chloë Rose had a problem beyond an artistic bent, but if she was suicidal, she needed more than a Mexican with a pill bottle and a stack of handkerchiefs to sop up her blood. The nurse on the phone assured me that they’d be right over.
Miguel had gotten her back in the bed, and was holding a new glass of water to her lips. I didn’t see if he had given her the pills too. I went back out into the hall, feeling that I had done what I could and a lot that I shouldn’t have, and wondering how I had put myself back into this thing right when I should have been walking out. Miguel joined me in a moment.
“Don’t be sore at me,” I said. “I didn’t mean for any of it to go that way in there.”
“We’re all doing our jobs,” he said.
I was too exhausted to fight with him.
“These doctors that you called? Will they call the police?”
“No. And they’ll do all they can to keep the police from her—to keep everyone from her, really.”
He nodded as though that was satisfactory. We went back downstairs and smoked cigarettes in silence while we waited. When the men in white came, they were quick, cool, and professional. We watched Chloë Rose, the great star, led into the back of the white van that read “Enoch White Clinic” in red with a caduceus along the side. They pulled away with her.
“Tell Rosenkrantz where she went, if he ever comes back,” I said. “He can call me if he wants to.”
Miguel didn’t say anything. I didn’t care. I set a brisk pace to my car, got in, made it to my apartment building, and fell on the mattress without taking off my shoes.