PROLOGUE
I dreamed of that night a hundred times. The gates of Windhall thrown open to greet a procession of ghostly cars, dazzling apparitions gliding up the drive. The garden, filled with deadly flowers and orange blossoms, the night sky a bowl of stars. And Windhall itself, blazing with light, all the windows thrown open to the summer air.
Most of all, I dreamed of Eleanor. She arrived late to the party that night, hours after the band had switched from lively swing to something sweet and melancholy. There wouldn’t be very many details of that night that the papers missed, since the host was one of the most famous people in Hollywood. Reporters would obsess over the attire, the music, the guest list. I had seen hundreds of pictures of the attendees, the giddy starlets and men in their tuxedos, eyes bright with alcohol and opportunity. They had always reminded me of the doomed aristocrats in some wicked fairy tale, all those gods gathered in one place, unaware that one of their own would shortly be killed.
There were no neighbors around Windhall that year. A decade before, in the 1930s, that part of Los Angeles was still sleepy orchards and farmland dotted with health clinics. Pale young women had wandered in the dusty California sunlight, bruises blooming against their milky skin. There had been more invalids than movie stars, with tuberculosis and polio patients coming out to the West Coast to strengthen their bones with sunshine and calcium. In the last decade, however, the land had been claimed by the Los Angeles elite. The orchards had yielded to wild, secretive mansions with deep windows and heavy doors. Windhall was one of the biggest.
I knew the script for the evening by heart. At seven, shortly after sunset, the first of the guests arrived. Men had been hired for the evening to park the expensive cars in the orchards that surrounded Windhall. That month was filled with garden parties that lasted until daybreak, beautiful women with ebony hair and alabaster skin traipsing down the garden paths, weaving poisonous flowers in their hair. The glittering actors and actresses of the silver screen would pile into cars, draped in furs and diamonds, then drive up Benedict Canyon and arrive at the gates of Windhall.
The evening continued. Twilight gave way to night, a collision of stars against a black landscape. The band began to play, something hopeful. The host of the party, Theodore Langley, had not yet made an appearance. There had been rumors about his latest film, trouble with one of the producers. Still, Theo was not one to be deterred by a little trouble at work. His name commanded respect, and it wasn’t just because of his legendary skills as a host. Theodore Langley was a talented director, one of the best.
More guests arrived. On that night, they were invincible, the rulers of a young kingdom. Their names and faces claimed every marquee in Hollywood and beyond, into the vast gray hinterland of unknown Middle America, dusty hamlets with little more than a main street and two stop signs.
The band continued to play. Nine o’clock. The night was a masquerade, filled with men accompanied by dates in silk dresses, all dark eyes and bright smiles. They drifted inside the house in a haze of cigarette smoke and expensive perfume, gliding down the halls of Windhall and trailing their fingers along the walls.
And finally, she arrived. Eleanor Hayes, queen of the silver screen, the type of femme fatale to be described by poets and yet never captured. She eluded description. That evening, she wore a green silk dress with a black sash; after her death, it would become emblematic. Her graceful throat was draped in pearls. The weekend before, she could be found pilfering hand-rolled cigarettes on the beach, but on this night, she was elegant.
There were stories about what went on behind the scenes, of course, but most of it remained unsubstantiated. There were stories of dark-eyed beauties who dipped their hands in rosewater and made animal sacrifices, then drank the blood. Chambers and death rooms beneath those big, crazy houses. Nighttime parades, swimming pools filled with champagne and drops of human blood. It was the golden age of Hollywood, after all, where the sins of a few went pardoned, if they were wealthy enough.
Ten o’clock. Someone suggested a game of hide-and-seek. All the guests ran to find a hidden space in that sprawling, somber house. Too many doors, too many windows, so many places to hide. One of the men began to count while the other guests vanished. One, two, three… eighty… one hundred…
The first guests were picked off quickly, hiding behind the grand piano. Some of them had hidden in the hedges of the garden, the night swollen with the scent of magnolia and jasmine. Greer Garson, Robert Taylor, Clifton Webb; each returned to the house and poured themselves another drink.
It was mid-May, coming up on the scalp of summer. Heat lingered in the bones of the valley, malignant and cruel. Coyotes had left the hills and wandered through the streets like crooked phantoms, looking for something to eat. Nothing was sacred, nothing was safe. The air was sweet with the smell of eucalyptus, burning oleander, salty earth, and chaparral. That late at night, the city took on a magical glow, wavering between black magic and a spell of sleep.
Two hours passed, and nearly every guest had been found. The only ones missing were Theo and Eleanor. Titters, rumors, and gossip: perhaps the pair had found something better to do with their time. There had always been rumors about Theo and Eleanor, working so closely on all those famous movies. If there was something going on behind the scenes, nobody would be surprised.
A waiter made another round with a tray of drinks, and talk idled. The first guests peeled off, heading home. Still no sign of the host and his leading lady. Three women remained, and two men. One of them made a lewd comment, a suggestion for how to fill the rest of the evening. Another guest complained about the heat.
And then Theo finally reappeared, standing in the door of the living room. His face was ashen, his hands shaking.
“There’s been an accident,” he said. “She’s in the garden.”
Later, after everything that happened, these words would become so famous that they were nearly always misquoted. They became a cliché, synonymous with broken Hollywood dreams and failed romances.
They found Eleanor in the bed of trampled rosebushes, lying in a dish of concave dirt. There’s been a fall. Even in the darkness of the garden, shadows collapsed all around the cast of characters, they could see it had not been a simple fall. A bloody star upon Eleanor’s chest, a badge of misplaced honor. The fabric had been torn.
One guest knelt beside her and tried to take a pulse.
“I can’t feel anything,” he said. “God, she looks awful. What happened?”
“It was an accident,” Theo repeated.
Eleanor’s head rolled upon her neck. A woman in a silk dress knelt in the dewy grass. “There’s blood on her chest,” she said, then gasped. “Eleanor!”
“Theo,” the man said softly. “I think she’s dead.”
At some point, the police arrived, but nobody was quite sure who had called them. The guests were questioned, but politely, of course; the police knew all their faces. There were no accusations, not that night; the accusations against Theo would begin to leak out the next day. It was the stuff of movies, after all: a famous Hollywood starlet, all dark eyes and long lashes, killed by her strange lover.
That year would raise questions without very many answers. Theo’s trial stretched on for the better part of a year. Private lives were thrown into question, and the members of Hollywood’s upper crust were forced to descend from their secret world to take part in the trial. Alliances were tested, secrets revealed.
The first policemen to arrive on the scene said that the cause of death was immediately apparent; even though the medical examiner was called for, his presence was almost unnecessary. Eleanor had been stabbed through the back. Her heart had been impaled; she had probably died right away. The garden was searched for weeks, but ultimately, the search was abandoned. They never found the murder weapon.
Eleanor Hayes, dead at twenty-six, never to age another day. I came to know her face by heart, the famous dark eyes and bowed lips, which were her trademark, the languorous gaze she cast upon her victims. At the peak of her career, she was the wealthiest woman in California, but this distinction did little to raise her social habits: weekends found her dancing barefoot in dim little bars of downtown Los Angeles, between smoky ghosts and Philip Marlowe types, or else up in the hills, riding bareback through the gorse and sagebrush. At night, they pitched tents and fell asleep to the sound of coyotes calling, waking up to see a glorious sunrise break over the dusty hamlets of Los Angeles.
And Theo. As the years faded away and the murder went unsolved, Eleanor became the woman in a myth, the details of her life blurred. Theo was released, in the end; the case fell apart. He was a secretive man with too many stories to tell, someone for whom the past and future could be rewritten. Still alive, all these decades later, but unseen since the trial.
As the years passed, Theo joined the ranks of true-crime lore, a cabal of wife-killers and opulent eccentrics whose names were tossed around as gossip rather than injunction. The ’60s passed, and then the ’70s; his legend was replaced first by the death of Marilyn Monroe and then the Manson killings, the deaths of Elvis and John Lennon. Home televisions replaced the fanaticism of classic movie theaters. Fans became caged by domesticity and the Internet. Celebrities shrank to fit the size of a mobile phone, easily tucked away for cigarette breaks at work. Theo was forgotten, mostly, relegated to a past of black-and-white movie screens; the grand old days. And then, late one autumn, he came back to me.