The next morning, Max interrupted Addison Phelps as he was updating his Web site. He invited Max into his room cordially enough, but asked him to wait a moment while he made sure his files transferred safely.
“The Internet connection in this hotel seems to come and go with the tides,” he informed Max. “Or perhaps it’s connected with the phases of the moon. Right now, it’s a very weak signal—just glacial. I hope you don’t mind—I haven’t done my updates for days. And now that I finally have the chance to do it, well…”
Max nodded amiably and took a seat near the open balcony window, where a cooling breeze lifted the sheer curtains framing each side. He took the opportunity to study the young man as he sat at the hotel desk, focused on his task. Addison, nicknamed Addy, was wholesome looking rather than conventionally handsome, with fair, lightly freckled skin and good clean lines of nose and jaw; he was spidery of build, and of indeterminate years. Max would have placed him at twenty-five and prematurely balding if he hadn’t known better from reading Patrice’s files. She had made a notation next to his name, a single phrase: “V. bright but sometimes plays the scatterbrain, don’t underestimate.” He had grown a beard he kept trimmed short and wore his sandy blond hair in a fashionable samurai topknot. His hair frizzed about his hairline, as if pulling it tight each day were breaking it at the roots. He sported a T-shirt that announced he was a fan of some band Max had never heard of, and artfully torn jeans that made him look as if he’d been attacked by ravening dogs.
The laptop he was working on emitted a small ping, indicating it was satisfied, and Addy closed the browser window. A photo of a colony of penguins appeared on the screen. Addy carried his desk chair over to sit near Max, giving him an artlessly sweet, good-natured smile. From what Max could see of the screen before Addy had logged out, he’d also been working on a document in screenplay format, with large white margins and headers indicating character names and strips of dialogue. With so much white space on the page, it looked to Max almost like cheating, like an author could write a full screenplay in no time compared with a manuscript, but Max suspected there might be more to it than that. God knew his sermons, however brief he tried to keep them, took forever to write. The trick, he had discovered, was always to open with a joke. One he had found recently on the Internet was, “What do Winnie the Pooh and John the Baptist have in common?” Answer: “The same middle name.” The congregation had loved that one.
“How can I help you—Max Tudor, is it? That detective told me to expect a visit from some sort of consultant on the case.”
Max nodded. Even under normal circumstances, he resisted being addressed as “Father Tudor.” He liked to think of himself as neither low nor high church, but falling somewhere on a broad continuum where compassion and common sense outweighed dogma. Titles created a distance between people that was difficult to bridge.
“Why do I feel suddenly like the Ghost of Christmas Past?” he asked. “With people being warned of my visit? But yes, and call me Max, please.” He hesitated a moment before adding: “In actual fact, I am an Anglican priest from Nether Monkslip, a nearby village. But I am here to talk with you about Margot Browne. The police have asked me to assist in this inquiry, if you’ve no objections to answering a few of my questions. In any event, I’d appreciate your keeping my—well, my mission to yourself for now.” Max wasn’t sure why, but he had made a decision on the spot to trust Addy with his actual identity and affiliation, where he had not done so with the others. There was something in Addy’s gentle manner that made Max feel he might be more amenable to a chat if it were clear that Max did not represent the full authority of the law. At least, not of earthly law.
“Of course,” said Addy. “I mean, I guess it’s okay. Her murder is all anyone is talking about here, for sure. I dare not leave my room for fear of being blinded by photographers’ camera flashes. What I can’t imagine is, why are you here—I mean, really? Are the police that short-staffed in England they have to recruit stand-ins from the local church? Who is minding the altar, in other words?”
Max smiled. “I have an able assistant filling in for me: the Rev. Destiny Chatsworth. I suppose it must look as if the police were desperately underfunded and understaffed. They are, in point of fact. But that doesn’t apply, not in this case. It’s more that DCI Cotton and I go back a long way.” He decided to leave it at that. If it implied Cotton was calling in some sort of favor, or implied nothing at all, that was fine with him. He was abashed to realize his truth telling during an investigation also fell along a continuum. But he certainly couldn’t explain to Addison or anyone that he was actually doing the rounds of the investigation at the behest of MI5.
“I see,” said Addison. “Or rather, I don’t see but I don’t imagine you’re going to tell me any more than that, are you?” He had a focused, concentrated way of listening for answers, almost as if he were hard of hearing and had deliberately to filter out any background noise.
Spot on, thought Max, who realized he was indeed talking with one of the brighter sparks in the group. After time spent with Tina, who struck him as more cunning than bright, it would come as a relief. “How do you like to be called?” Max asked him. “Is Addy all right?”
“Sure. Everyone calls me Addy. Addison is too pretentious to live up to, don’t you think? I’d have to buy a cravat and riding boots and spend all day swapping bon mots with the baron and baroness.”
“Perhaps your parents had high aspirations. Or is it a family name?”
“Both. It’s a family name. My mother’s family. She was an Addison”—and here he lifted his voice into a nasal falsetto—“‘you know, the famous makers of Addison’s Idaho potato chips and other wholesome snacks.’ ‘Famous’ being a euphemism for richer than God, which they were—are—and never let anyone forget it. I have four siblings, all with names starting with A, but with normal names like Abigail.”
“I believe I’ve actually heard of the brand—or of the family, rather.”
“It was her grandfather, my great-grandfather, who started the line of products. He was a wily old coot, by all telling, who was buried clutching his Bible, which had his first dollar tucked between the pages—probably somewhere around St. Paul’s letter to the Philistines. He renovated an old factory during the depression and started helping to feed the nation’s appetite for relatively cheap, deep-fried foods. You can lay North America’s current obesity epidemic squarely at his door. I never eat the things, myself.”
“I see. So, you’re from Idaho, then?”
Addy nodded. “That’s right. Beautiful place. Great skiing. You ever been?”
“Not yet,” Max replied. “One day I hope to visit. I do know you’re a long way from home. What brings you here?”
Addy crossed one leg tightly over the other, lacing his hands together rather primly on top of his left knee. “On the accursed cruise, you mean? The short answer is Romero invited me. He became friendly with my agent when he was trying to acquire the screenplay rights to another of her author’s books. She recommended me as someone who could turn the story into a screenplay.”
“I thought the book’s author did that.”
“Turn his own book into a screenplay, you mean? Oh, God no. Not if they value their lives. Much better to cash the check and leave someone else with all the headaches.”
“I see. And the long answer about what brought you here?”
“The long answer is that Romero knew from my agent I was researching a bio of Margot Browne, and he thought I might take her off his hands. Keep her busy with interviews and flattery, you know, while keeping her away from him and Trixie—what’s her name.”
“Tina,” Max supplied.
“That’s it. What an enormous idiot. I hope Romero knows what he’s doing. Anyway, when someone offers you an all-expense-paid vacation on his luxury yacht, you accept, even though I was in the middle of everything and the weather conditions were far from ideal for a pleasure cruise. We spent a lot of time below deck while we were at sea, praying for sunlight and sight of land, like a load of well-fed pilgrims. If you’ve spent any time with theater or movie people you might know that it’s not as much fun as it may sound.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“I suppose because there really aren’t that many roles in movies anymore, so they all scratch around like chickens after the leftover chicken feed. It’s like Norma Desmond in that movie—you know, Sunset Boulevard: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ Imagine a whole roomful or, in this case, a shipful of that sort of look-at-me nonsense. Actually, what’s happened these days is the movies got big, bigger, biggest. It’s only keeping the stuntmen and the special effects experts employed, filming these action movies. And the lead parts go to the same handful of actors every time. Tom Cruise and his boyish grin will keep appearing until they have to wheel him off the set. It’s a cutthroat business—in fact, we need a new word for cutthroat.”
“How about murderous,” said Max mildly.
“Well, yeah. But surely you’re not suggesting Margot was killed because she was threatening to take some other actress’s part, are you? That is unlikely in the extreme, if only because if Margot were the last actress standing she’d still have trouble landing a role, any role.”
“Because of her age?”
“Well, yes, frankly, there aren’t that many parts for mature women.” He was picking at the tear in one knee of his jeans, pulling on the loose threads. “But it’s more than that. She had a reputation for being difficult. That’s poison in this industry—in any industry, I guess. The fans may not care, so long as they get the escapism they paid for up there on the screen or on the stage. They might even think a reputation for difficulty enhances the fantasy—the star so powerful she can bend directors to her will. It adds some spice to their illusions. Margot was never all that. She was famously unreliable: she’d show up late on set three sheets to the wind more often than not. Rumors of cocaine use and even worse abounded, although I really don’t think the ‘even worse’ was true: her chosen poison was booze. If she took drugs it was to help her sleep, and I think she may have been slightly hooked there, yes. Maurice—you’ve met Maurice?—he’s a saint, really. Saint Maurice—I like the sound of that. He was the only one who could put up with her. After a while, he was the only one who even tried. But even Maurice—you don’t want to push him too far, saint or no. He’ll lose it when he’s had enough.”
“Do you think he’s capable of this crime?” Max asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Not really. No.” Addy’s clear gaze slid away, then returned with the full force of a basically honest nature owning up to the truth. “Well, sure. Everyone is capable. The question is, would he break like that? I think not. He’s a decent sort, if a little high-strung.”
Max couldn’t help but agree: Maurice seemed unlikely, by nature and by lack of motive. But Maurice might have motives that couldn’t yet be guessed at.
“Besides, there’s an angle the police may be missing. I overheard something one night…”
“Oh?”
“Yes, oh. It was Margot and she was below deck talking to the chef. I’ve no idea what she was doing there but her voice carried up the companionway to where I happened to be standing. She was saying something like, ‘Julie was only thirteen, wasn’t it?’”
Max grew very still. “You’re sure she was with Zaki?”
“That voice, that accent of his—they’re unmistakable. Let’s say I’m ninety percent sure. If she’d been with anyone else, I might have thought she was rehearsing a play or something. Then she said, ‘No wonder you left Hollywood on the next boat out.’”
“And what did Zaki—or whoever—reply to that?”
“About what you’d expect. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’”
“But you took it to mean … What?”
“Given that I never could stomach the sight of Zaki? That he just gave me the creeps so much I didn’t even want to eat the food he’d prepared? I think Margot had something on him. At a guess, something involving an underage girl.”
However would Margot have got hold of that information? Max supposed the Hollywood grapevine had deep, tangled roots. How foolish of her to confront Zaki with what she knew—if there were truth behind her words, it was an extremely dangerous thing to do.
“When did you first meet Margot?” he asked Addy.
“I met her when she was starring in a play in New York called Lyre, Lyre, Pants on Fyre—some kind of Celtic detective musical, as I recall. Don’t ask. I was hired as a sort of script doctor to punch up the play book, breathe some life into it. But it was DOA, really, long before I got there. The play folded within a couple of months, and it was an absolute freaking miracle it lasted that long. How it made it out of the fringe theaters is likewise a wonder. And all my rewrites went for nothing. Margot would get out there and ad lib for all she was worth—she was constantly going off-script, wandering around, moving the props. The poor guy playing opposite her felt like he’d wandered onto the wrong set, and would start to flub his own lines. Or his lines would make no sense in the context she’d just created. God, the memories. I’d stand in the wings grinding my teeth as she warbled her way through “Lord of the Wells,” flitting hither and yon and upstaging all the actors. If you’re looking for motives, you could start with the entire cast of that play.”
“She could sing, then? I wasn’t aware of that.”
“No. No, she could not sing. At least, I wouldn’t call it singing. Could Marilyn Monroe do more than sort of breathe and heave and shimmy her way through ‘Happy Birthday’? I mean to say, no one was there to learn whether or not Margot Browne could sing. Despite the march of years, she appeared all but topless in that play.”
“Did she often appear on the stage? I thought she was more a film star.”
“She did both, although she was a better film star. Which is like saying malaria is a way better disease than typhoid—she could barely act in either case. But at least you can do a retake of a scene on film; what happens on stage is ground indelibly into memory.”
“Why did she persist in it, do you think?”
“Oh, that’s easy. She wanted to be taken seriously as an Actor—that’s Actor with a capital A. Very early on she badgered some director into letting her appear in his play. The play was called Shopgirl—I think that was it. It didn’t do too badly, really: had quite a long run in London—see ‘topless’ as above. They say she had exquisite breasts then, like the Venus de Milo’s or Pamela Harriman’s.”
“Hmm.” Max failed to see how Margot’s anatomy could end up being the key that would unlock the investigation, but Addy was a willing and articulate witness so he let him ramble on.
“And then of course there were the porn films. Or perhaps, just the one. Soft porn, I should add.”
“You don’t say,” said Max. Might yet more blackmail play into this? If Margot had been trying to threaten or blackmail Zaki, for example, might he have countered by threatening to reveal something in her own past—if he knew of it? Was Margot likely to say, with Wellington, “Publish and be damned” to a blackmailer? Max thought she might.
“I don’t judge her for that, do you? The porn? She was never in high demand and this … well, it paid the rent. She only did it because she was young and hungry, and the real parts were so few and far between. I think it’s where she learned that if you can’t act, you can at least take your clothes off, and you’ll get by.”
Max felt that in the grand scheme, people had done much worse things for money. The bigger problem with the entire porn industry, in his view, was that it was so exploitative—generally only the men profited from it. He said, “I wonder when all this was? The Celtic play, for example. A chronological telling might help.”
“Lyre, Lyre was about five years ago. Maybe less. Mercifully, my memory fails me on many of the particulars. But there’s nothing simpler than to find out.” He reached for his laptop, tapped a few keys, and pulled up his own Web site, “Addywood,” where appeared a list of all of Margot’s roles throughout the years. It began with Bad Cattle, “the Western that made her famous,” Addy assured him.
“I don’t see how I missed that one,” said Max. “I do like watching old films.”
“Count your blessings. I was forgetting—no doubt you count blessings as a matter of course.”
“I do try.”
“Here we go,” said Addy after a moment of scrolling up and down the screen. “Here’s Shopgirl. If you want the dates for that one, you’re looking way back: June 1981 to May 1983. God, to have been there to see it, but I wasn’t born yet. It ran not quite two years but by West End standards that’s practically Mousetrap. The play died a natural death once half the males of London had been by to ogle Margot’s cleavage.”
“After which, presumably, she returned to Hollywood.”
“I guess so. There’s a gap before she started rehearsals for El Paso Posse, another Western—a return to her roots, so to speak. She’d done well with her first Western and this was probably another trip to that well.”
“Did it work? Was it successful, I mean?” It all sounded to Max like quite a climb down from her glory days in London.
“It did okay, but nothing like Shopgirl. With Margot, the only thing that mattered was the costume, and wearing jeans and a plaid shirt didn’t allow her to show off the full range of her talent. She was hardly Barbara Stanwyck, after all. So after El Paso Posse she moved on to mysteries—what I believe you call crime stories in this country. The first of those was called Bad Actress—and didn’t the critics just cry for happy over that title. But that’s where she found her métier, in that sort of noir, pulp-revival thing. You know, the dame goes into the PI’s office to beg for his help, only she ain’t got the jake to pay him. But she’s a nice kid so he takes pity and takes on the case pro bono and the next thing you know he’s up to his neck in bullets. You know the kind of crap. And it turns out she ain’t such a nice kid after all. Cut to the final reel, where she tries to leave him holding the bag from the big bank heist. I swear to God, I could write this stuff in my sleep. Anyway, Margot would take a bullet at the end every time, only to reappear in the next film, looking none the worse for wear.”
“Actually, after talking with Maurice, I doubt that is true—the part about her being none the worse for wear. Her private life must have been showing up on her face after a few years, even with his expert attentions.”
There was a still pause while Addison considered this. Finally he made a slight tsk sound and said, “The rumor mill started working overtime, yes. From the interviews I’ve conducted to date in Hollywood, and in London, with people who worked with her, she was on a slow but irreversible decline. Apparently, she wasn’t too careful about the company she kept, or about where she kept it. Or how many she kept it with. I gather it didn’t bother her if her lovers were married—the more married the merrier, in fact. Plus, there was a tangential sort of descent into the opium dens of L.A., if the gossip is anything to go by.”
“Do you believe it? The gossip?”
Addy sat back in his chair, crossing his arms in a defensive posture. “It’s neither here nor there if I believe it. I’m not writing an authorized biography or even an unauthorized one. And of course now that she’s dead … well. I’ve barely cut through the concertina wire around her personal life—some, but not all of it. Anyway, I’m not claiming to write the absolute truth. Who can do that, anyway? You have to leave things out and put things in, and what’s left may or may not be a fair portrayal of the subject. I’m writing a ‘based on’ story, or trying to, but I’m changing the details so much no one can ever come back to me and claim I’ve held them up to ridicule or caused them harm or something. I’m thinking about the married lovers here—I’m not going to get into some legal imbroglio as easily as all that. Of course, as I say, with Margot dead now it changes things.”
“But the book you’re writing—it’s definitely about Margot. You’ve said as much, and not just to me.”
Addy held up an admonishing finger. “Nope, and nice try. I am writing a story about a terrible actress of minimal talent who is coasting by on her looks until one day, she realizes she’s nearly sixty, the parts have dried up long ago, and she’s staring a lonely death in the face. But she never realizes it’s her own behavior that has brought her to this sorry pass. That, my friend, is a description that could apply to half the people in Hollywood; at least, those of a certain age. And not necessarily just the women, either. It’s not about Margot, which at some level must really irk the crap out of her—have irked the crap out of her—because its being all about her is what she lived for, for so long. It’s about ‘Everyactress,’ if you will. If you want to get really deep or pretentious, we could say my book is about the human condition as much as it is about Margot. In fact, let’s just say that it is and be done with it.”
“But Margot inspired it,” Max insisted. “Why Margot and not some other actress then?”
Addy shrugged. “I’d spent time with her during Lyre, Lyre. She really was one of a kind. I don’t know—I was just drawn to her as a subject. Writers don’t pick their topics; their topics pick them.”
“How near are you to completing the book?” Max asked.
Addy replied with a shake of his head. “Honestly, I don’t know. The writing’s ground to a halt with her death and even I am not sure why. I may have to shelve the thing and go do something else.”