Max found Maurice Brandon in room 202 of the hotel. He had, he explained to Max, been “positively horizontal, trying to come to grips with what had happened to poor, dear Margot.” The blackout shades in the room were drawn and Max, not asking permission, walked over to pull them open.
He explained his mission to Maurice, eliding over his role for MI5—in fact, failing to mention it entirely. It wouldn’t do to get everyone too excited until he knew exactly what he, Patrice, and Cotton were dealing with here. And at the mention of MI5, in his experience, witnesses could become either recalcitrant or overly cooperative, making up stories in a desire to “help” the authorities. He had never completely understood this proclivity but people did so love to be in the limelight, helping to catch the bad guy.
Having coaxed Maurice out of his bed and jolted him into cooperation with a few probing but gently phrased questions, Max found he now had only to sit back and listen. He first persuaded Maurice to splash some water onto his face, throw a jacket on for warmth, and join him in a stroll outside and away from his room. He imagined the hotel maids were anxious to get in there to do their jobs.
The hotel boasted an Italian-style rose garden with a number of quiet pathways that led up to the woods ringing the back of the hotel. The main garden was reached via a terrace, artfully constructed to look as if it were following the natural contours of the land. Max imagined that in summer the flowerbeds would offer a full riot of color, the blooms nurtured by the mild coastal temperatures. At night the gardens would be illuminated by lights hidden beneath trees and bushes, making them the perfect setting for a midnight tryst. The two men passed tennis courts and an indoor and outdoor swimming pool to their right, finding in the center of the garden an oasis of scented peace in which to talk. No one was about.
Four chairs formed a semicircle at the foot of a marble statue of Neptune; Max took a seat and gestured Maurice into the chair opposite. Max had suspected the change of scene would do much to restore Maurice’s equilibrium. He saw he was right. Maurice looked about him, breathing in the exotic scents of foliage.
He now was more than willing to talk; it was, in fact, as if he had waited his whole life for this moment. But after five minutes, Maurice had said little that could pertain to the murder, as far as Max could tell.
“Margot applied makeup like someone who was going blind in one eye,” Maurice was saying. “I begged her—I simply begged her!—to let me help with her daytime makeup. On the set, I could get some control over her, of course, but in her private life? Noooo. No! I could only wait and hope for turquoise eye shadow to come back in style. Which of course it never never never will. And—”
“I see. It must have been trying,” cut in Max, hoping to stem the flow. “So you—”
“And as for the eyeliner—well, there was no pot of shiny black eyeliner left in any drugstore in the land once Margot had passed through town. The cheaper, the better—she probably bought it in bulk. Appalling taste, she had, like a teenager experimenting with makeup. No sense of style what-so-freaking-ever. Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra was an exercise in understated nuance by comparison. Poor Margot, if only she’d lived, I feel I could have brought some influence to bear. Don’t get me started on the hair extensions.”
“I won’t,” said Max. “Tell me—please—how long you knew Margot? How did you two meet?”
Maurice settled back into an open, reminiscent posture, crossing one trendily coutured leg over another, and tipping his bald head back to gaze at the sky as he collected his thoughts. He was wearing hip-hugging trousers of a stretchy leatherette fabric in a color Max was sure Maurice would call “eggplant.” Max was not entirely certain Maurice was the last word in understated nuance himself, but still Max would trust him to have his finger on the pulse of whatever Paris and Milan had decreed for the fashion world this season.
Maurice took a deep breath, dropped his gaze to meet Max’s, and said, “She was just a girl starting out when we met, so this was thirty-five years ago. Thirty-five years! No, I tell a lie, it was more. More like forty years—I can’t get over it. We actually shared an apartment for a short while. It didn’t last, of course. Too much drama. But one feels one gets to know a person well over that first cup of coffee in the morning and that last drink at night. I am probably one of the few people on earth besides her mother who has seen Margot without her makeup, and wearing a pink chenille bathrobe. That’s how much she trusted me, to let me see her at her worst and know I’d never write a tell-all. Of course, in those days she had that perfect alabaster skin, and dark lashes out to there, so she could get away with very little makeup. Some redheads are cursed in the eyelash department, not to mention the freckle aisle. That’s when you get that albinoish Game of Thrones look if you’re not careful.” Another deep sigh, this time accompanied by a shake of the head. “She didn’t take care of her complexion over the years—I told her and told her that hard liquor sucks out the collagen and if you’re going to sunbathe you’ll end up looking like a roasted turkey—and of course the last little nip-and-tuck left her mouth looking so stretched she could play the terrified ingénue in a fright film without actually having to act. Which of course would have been a blessing by that point, too. I doubt she could even blink for some months after that last surgery. The doctor was later struck off the list, you know. Quite the scandal. She—”
“You say, ‘It didn’t last, of course.’ Sharing the apartment with her. ‘Too much drama,’ you said. Why is that? What was the drama about?” Part of the technique any interrogator kept in his arsenal was simply to repeat back the suspect’s own words. It focused their minds wonderfully to realize someone was actually paying attention to what they said.
Maurice returned his gaze to the view of clouds passing overhead as he grappled to frame his answer. Finally he looked at Max and said, “There is no diplomatic way to put this. Margot liked men. Lots of men; the more the merrier. Tall, short, handsome, ugly—it didn’t seem to matter. One guy she dated looked like the sort of troll you’d find under a bridge in a fairy tale, I’m not exaggerating. She would come home from a party, three sheets to the wind, with some guy in tow who could have been a professional burglar or drug dealer by the look of him. She liked a bit of rough, in other words. I hope I’m not speaking too frankly, um—what is your name again?”
“Max Tudor. Please just call me Max. I’m not with the police in any official capacity as a detective, you understand. I’m not attached to the force. You’re not obliged to talk to me. It just may help catch her killer if you do.” He felt he couldn’t emphasize his non-status enough, but Maurice seemed to accept his presence without question. He found Max to be agreeable company and he was, as Max had noted, eager to talk, anyway. Max could have added that in his line of work as a vicar he’d been rendered fairly shockproof. The more the years passed, the more he had come to realize how true that was. His work for MI5 was practically a ladies’ auxiliary tea party by comparison. One met all sorts of people as a vicar, people who had made all manner of poor choices in their lives and were struggling with the consequences. Or people who had in all their innocence been flattened by random tragedy. Those sorts of people were the reason churches—and temples and synagogues and religion in general—existed in the first place. The rich, complacent, and happy didn’t need a lot of consoling, nor did they tend to heed advice, anyway. Not until it was their turn on the wheel of fortune.
“No worries,” said Maurice nodding. “You’re just here to help—I do see.” He seemed to assume Max was some sort of trained psychologist come to calm the traumatized witnesses. Max decided to let him go on believing that for now, batting away the twinge of conscience that whispered how easily he had resumed his deceptive MI5 ways. It was all, he told himself firmly, in the greater cause of justice.
“Of course,” Maurice continued. “Well, if any of the men Margot dragged back to the apartment were going to amount to something one day, they hadn’t got started yet. A couple of times, things actually went missing from the place. Spare change. My checkbook. One time a frying pan—” and here he held up a hand to ward off questions. “Don’t ask, no idea. But the next time something like that happened I told her it had to stop. I wasn’t exactly celibate myself but I was choosy who I brought home, who I got involved with. Hollywood is a small town but it’s not like a small town in Kansas—that’s where she was from, Margot. She simply didn’t have those filters that said, ‘This man is cray-zy. Do not go near him. Do not, above all, sleep with him.’ To her it was all ‘Experience, Darling!’: Live life to the full, my cup runneth over, my candle burns at both ends, and et cetera and so on. She was a hopeless romantic, Margot. Hopeless. She seemed to think it was all research for some future movie role. I didn’t try to change her or fix her or even advise her to carry mace with her at all times if she was going to date these bozos. I simply had to protect myself. I called a final come-to-Jesus roommate meeting with her after some jerk stole my first edition Jack Kerouac one night. Some screenwriter she’d met along the way. Oh, and by the way, he’d dropped ash on my new living room carpet. I smoke myself but I hate smokers when they’re inconsiderate, don’t you? Anyway, that really was it for me.”
“Last straw,” said Max. “I do see. How very odd. A frying pan, you say.”
“Yes, perhaps you have a different word for it in the U.K.”
“No, we call it a frying pan. I just meant, what an odd thing to steal. But if you’re quite sure…” Max at least was getting a sense of what Cotton had been hinting at with regard to the date rape drug. It sounded as if rendering the poor woman helpless for such wicked purposes had hardly been necessary.
“Yes, I’m sure,” said Maurice. “When you think about it, it’s rather difficult to misplace a frying pan. You don’t tend to leave it in the living room or propping up books in the bedroom. No, he stole it. I guess he really needed one. Anyway, there were plenty of those last-straw moments when I would swear I’d had enough. I really did like Margot, and I felt protective of her. Talk about a babe in the woods. I loved her in some ways, I suppose, like an older brother. But in the end she was just too dangerous to keep around. I gave her a month’s notice—it was my place, my name on the lease—and helped her find a small place of her own.” He shook his head. “Later on, she’d sometimes show up in the makeup trailer with a bruise or a shiner. I felt terrible. Terrible. That had never happened when I’d been around the apartment. I’d no idea—my presence alone had protected her somehow. I’d thrown her to the … to the wolves. To the trolls. To the trolls of Hollywood, the worst kind.”
There were tears pooling at the corners of the man’s eyes, and his throat had closed over his last few words, rendering them almost inaudible. He fished in his jacket for a tissue as Max waited, knowing those tears to be real. It didn’t mean Maurice wasn’t the guilty party. Max believed he was close to Margot, at least had been at one time. But the best of friends quarrel. A best friend can be standing in the way of something the other person wants—and not even know it.
From behind the tissue came a series of thunderous honks, the sound of a hundred geese startled into flight: Maurice blowing his nose. When he had finished he was somewhat more composed but his eyes still were red. He probably hadn’t slept since it happened, dark room or no.
“I have asked myself so many times,” Maurice said now, “if I couldn’t have done more to save Margot from herself. Over many years I’ve asked myself—not just since she … since she died. If I couldn’t have got her into therapy or something. Staged an intervention. Locked the booze cabinet. Given her a one-way ticket back to Kansas. I don’t know. Something.”
“Would she have listened, do you think?” Max asked.
Maurice smiled at him bleakly. “Of course not.”
“There you are.” The latest New Agey advice was never to interfere with the difficulties of others. A compassionate man like Max, not to mention a man with the need to see justice done, struggled with this concept all the time, while recognizing its wisdom: there was safety in not getting involved.
“And since there were never any real consequences—her career began to soar, there was always another movie, another man; there was always makeup to hide the bruises—it was difficult to warn her where she was headed. I wasn’t sure I knew that myself. A lot of women would have killed to be Margot.” He caught himself up. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Unfortunately, the story you’re telling isn’t all that unfamiliar. Some women are attracted to abusive men—in general, to people they think they can fix. It takes a whole lot more than warnings from their friends and family to get them to start trying to fix what really needs fixing, which is their own terrified, lonely selves.”
Maurice nodded eagerly, relieved to be understood. “Because each one of these creeps, you see, was the one. Some one-night stand she met at a party that she managed to turn into a month-long stand if she was really unlucky. She thought she’d hit the jackpot if she convinced one of these Neanderthals to actually marry her. She was such a little fool. She would tell me all about it as I dabbed concealer under her eyes. A yellow-based pot concealer works best, you know. It neutralizes the blue. It took forever to camouflage the damage but you watch her films—you can’t tell it’s there. I really blended it in until no one could see. It’s different now, with high-def film and all … oh, my God. Don’t even get me started.”
Max nodded solemnly, again unwilling to stop the flow of words.
“Anyway,” said Maurice, perhaps realizing that Max was not the ideal audience for makeup tips, “one time it was a swollen lip and there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. Everyone assumed she’d gone crazy with the Botox. Anyway, the latest Misunderstood One was so talented, so smart. He just needed a break and she was going to recommend him to her agent, her director. Or she would buy him new clothes, get him a new haircut, whatever it was she thought he needed. It goes without saying she cooked and mended for these guys, and if they were late with a car payment she’d help them out—just this once, you know the kind of thing. It was enough to make you sick. Well, it made me angry, to be honest.”
“How many times was she married?” Max asked.
“Do you know, I rather lost count. Seven? She gave up on the big weddings after about the third one and would sort of elope to Las Vegas to cement her subsequent unions. She seemed to realize no one who cared about her wanted to encourage this crazy behavior anymore and besides, once her career started to soar, she didn’t need anything. I mean, how many toasters and coasters can you use?”
“No children, I gather.”
“None she was aware of. Sorry, that’s an old joke.” Maurice’s voice drifted off, and his gaze traveled to where Neptune listened, uncaring. “There were rumors of a child, way back in the beginning, maybe back in Kansas. Or was it after she came to Hollywood? Sorry to be so vague. She never ever ever talked about it. Not even in her cups.” He glanced sideways now and his gaze remained there. He sighed. “She would have sworn me to secrecy, anyway.”
Max wondered if that was an admission he knew more than he was owning to.
“The child would have been given up for adoption, presumably?”
“I guess so. Or left with a family member. The only reference she ever made to the whole episode was a sort of Scarlett O’Hara moment when I overheard her telling wardrobe she used to have a nineteen-inch waist or something.”
“Then how do … Sorry, but how is it you know so much about it if she never spoke about it?”
“Oh. Some gossip columnist got hold of the story, years ago. God alone knows how. The studio paid out to shut them up and the whole thing died down. It couldn’t happen now: that’s another thing that’s changed, along with high-def film. You’d go broke paying hush money to the scandalmongers now, and it probably wouldn’t work, besides. The genie has left that bottle.”
“Was it a girl? Boy?” asked Max.
Maurice shook his head. “No idea. Sorry. And, mind, I can’t confirm there was a baby at all. It was gossip, I tell you. I’m sorry I brought it up.” He looked straight at Max. “You have a way of getting people to let down their guard, don’t you?”
Max made a mental note to get Cotton on the case. Even if the records were sealed, if there had been an adoption, the police might be able to persuade a magistrate to open up the files in a case of murder.
It would take time, however. And so long as they were in the dark about what was going on, time was what they didn’t have.