The missing guests began to filter back in. Boots, Toshia, and Eleanor reappeared looking like the cat that ate the canary. Honey slipped in a moment later, distinctly tumbled, and John Emerson came in by another door, looking smooth and crisp as ever.
“You changed your suit,” Anita observed dryly.
Docky and Louella came in, whispering heatedly. Lulu wondered if they were having an affair. She didn’t know anything about the gossip columnist’s personal life. Louella thrived on other people’s secrets but was a cipher herself.
Freddie entered without Lulu seeing him, and managed to startle her by whispering from behind, “I was on a secret mission.”
She jumped. “What were you up to?”
“Hearst needed to talk to Waters some more, but again I wasn’t privy to it. I guess mere assistants aren’t to be trusted with state secrets. I had to wait in the hallway, which gave me ample time to sneak away and change the place cards in the dining room. They had us miles apart. Wait until you see the dining room. My father would turn pea green and explode with envy, which makes me think I should arrange for an invitation. That would be a sight I’d rather enjoy.” Lulu would have laughed had she not felt a chill at the mention of Freddie’s monster of a father. How very far the apple had fallen from that tree.
“Now we’re right next to each other. I know it’s terribly gauche to seat couples together, but what does a former hobo know about good manners?” He snuck a light kiss on her cheek, making a swooning sound like Groucho Marx.
Hearst returned last of all, slightly out of breath and with a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Sorry, folks. Life of a publishing magnate.” Now that he was there, dinner could begin.
Lulu stopped dead in her tracks when she entered the palatial dining room, known as the Refectory. “Where’s Henry the Eighth?” she asked in a breathless whisper, gazing at the royal magnificence.
Veronica, coming up beside her, gestured to Hearst. “So watch your head.”
The Refectory looked like it belonged in a medieval castle. The scale was cavernous, at least three stories high. Figures in bas-relief looked down from the ceiling. Lulu couldn’t tell if they were saints or goddesses or Hearst’s old girlfriends, but they made her feel disturbingly like she was standing wrong way around and might fall from floor to ceiling any moment.
There were banners flying, and feudal tapestries of hunting scenes hung on the walls, deer getting elegantly slaughtered in centuries-old thread. In the center of the room was a huge banquet table with fifty or more chairs. Footmen were already seating Hearst and Marion in the middle, directly across from each other.
“Yoo-hoo, Lulu!” Marion called, wiggling her hand at Lulu. “Some sap put you at the end of the table, so I switched your place card to be closer to the action. Perks of being the hostess.”
Lulu cast a despairing glance at Freddie.
Hearst protested that the change would mean men and women didn’t alternate like they should, so there was a last-minute shuffle as cards were exchanged, to everyone’s annoyance, until Hearst was satisfied.
“Who is this?” Hearst asked, holding up Juliette’s card. She hadn’t yet returned from her humiliating burial duty, though, so Hearst ordered her card to be put at the less prestigious end of the table, the place reserved for lowly accountants or writers. “Serves her right for being late,” he said pettishly.
As Lulu was taking her seat, a new man walked in and took a seat at the far end of the table. Lulu gasped, and froze with her derriere hovering above her chair.
“No,” she whispered. Her breath came hard, and her heart beat wildly in her chest. That glimpse she’d seen as they arrived hadn’t been her imagination. Sal Benedetto was really here!
She shot Freddie a frantic look. What was Sal doing at the Ranch? How had he attracted the attention of a man like Hearst? She couldn’t guess the answer to the latter, but she began to tremble in fear that his main purpose in coming here was to continue his unwanted pursuit of her. He’d already bought off police and threatened her with prison in his attempt to procure her. Though she’d offered him no encouragement, he was obsessed and had told her directly that it was only a matter of time before she was his. He was a man accustomed to getting whatever he wanted.
Even if she hadn’t been head over heels in love with Freddie, she would never yield to Sal’s advances. The man terrified her. He was a callous gangster who had happily taken over his father’s criminal empire and subsequently created a patina of culture around himself. But there was no amount of money or artificial suavity that could eclipse the fact that the first time she’d seen him, she had witnessed him shoot a rival in the head in cold blood. Her impression of him hadn’t improved since.
Though her first impulse was to flee, Lulu soon found her steel. She sat and tried not to stare at him down the table. Sal wasn’t just a dangerous man; he imperiled the entire life she’d worked so hard to build. He knew about the past that she hid so carefully. If Sal chose to casually pull one silken thread, the entire fabric of her life would unravel, and no one in this mercenary business would glance back or remember her. If he bothered her, she’d have to deal with it privately, hidden away from the hundreds of prying eyes that surrounded them at the Ranch.
Sal only glanced her way, a smile playing on his sensuously curving mouth. He gave her the barest nod, then turned his attention to the luscious starlet on his right. Lulu might have been no more than a passing acquaintance.
Her jaw dropped. Inexplicably, she became aware of a heat in her cheeks. How dare he!
Unaccountably annoyed, Lulu settled herself uneasily in her chair and looked around the room. She was sitting directly across from Freddie. It wasn’t as close as she was hoping for, but at least they could talk. John Emerson was on her left, and an artist named Hugh d’Or was on her right.
Neither was shy in expressing their admiration of her. By the time the asparagus soup was cleared away for the next course, each had made her a proposal of sorts. John dropped his napkin and ham-handedly brushed her thigh retrieving it, then told her that, perhaps, if the stars aligned, even if she didn’t get the starring role, he could write a noteworthy part for her. He said it as other men might ask the time of day, and she assumed it was one of his standard pickup lines. Anita caught Lulu’s eye and gave a little shrug.
Hugh the cubist talked about himself, slyly offered to paint her, then talked about himself some more. “You would be nude, naturellement, for the human form is the expression of the divine, no? But you would be rendered in flesh-colored geometry, cones and spheres, indistinguishable from other females. You can be nude without fear, for no one will know it is you.”
“So I could be anyone?” Lulu asked archly.
“Oui.”
“Then I don’t see why I should let you paint me when an ice-cream cone could serve just as well as a model.” She tried to talk to Freddie across the table, but she had to shout to make herself heard above the lively din, and most of the things she wanted to say to him were meant to be spoken in loving murmurs. The other things were about Sal. Neither was appropriate dinner table conversation.
It might be too far to conveniently talk, but perhaps they could communicate another way. She reached out her foot, feeling for his, catching his eye, and looking meaningfully down at the middle of the table.
He must have understood, because after a moment of discreet searching, Lulu found his foot. She stroked it with the side of her kitten-heeled shoe and found bare flesh. Her lips curling into a secret smile, she looked demurely at Freddie across the table and slipped her own shoe off. Clever boy! Though she wondered what he’d done with his sock and how he’d get it back on when dinner was over.
His foot was chilly, and she placed her own silk-stockinged foot over it to warm it up.
“Cold in here, isn’t it?” she shouted across the table at Freddie. He smiled but gave her a funny look.
His foot was strangely inert. But then she realized that he must be extending his leg as far as it would go to reach her. He probably couldn’t move it to stroke her foot without being obvious. It was a compliment to Lulu that he could flirt with her at all, given the gorgeous women on either side of him. Jean Harlow was on his right, a dancer named Ginger Rogers on his left. The last-minute card switcheroo had put him in an enviable position.
So Lulu did the work for both of them, caressing his foot with hers as she pretended to be impressed by the artist’s inflated ego and John Emerson’s poorly concealed advances amid bits of acid wisdom.
“Hearst claims he’s such an animal lover,” Emerson said as the main course was served. “But look at his table. Foie gras. Veal. And do you know what this is?”
“Duck, I think,” said Lulu, salivating at the rich aroma and the crispy fat. Her physical culture coach would have a fit if she saw Lulu eating something like that. Lulu planned to ask for seconds.
“Pressed duck. Just this morning our fine feathered friend was decorating the pond for the pleasure of WR’s guests. Next thing he knows he’s being slowly strangled to death.” A look of malicious pleasure crossed Emerson’s face as he mimed squeezing the life out of someone. “Not for him the quick death of the guillotine. This duck’s blood had to be saved for nefarious purposes. Next he was plucked and half roasted—let’s pray he was quite dead, not just faking and hoping for the best—and his tender bits removed. The rest of his mortal remains were clamped in a sterling-silver vise and squeezed until they yielded their juices. See that delicious-looking sauce? Blood and marrow, semi-raw. Spanish Inquisition duck, I call it. And yet they say Hearst won’t kill a bug.”
At the center of the long table, Hearst was shoveling crisp, fatty duck into his mouth.
Lulu shuddered. She’d suddenly lost her appetite.
Louella’s shrill voice rang out. She was one of the only people—besides Hearst himself—who could command the attention of most of the table. She might be Hearst’s minion, writing for his papers and commenting on his radio stations, but she was powerful in her own right.
“Mr. Hearst, I cannot understand why Marion hasn’t talked you out of your disgraceful habit.”
Hearst looked momentarily alarmed, until Louella went on. “You have built the biggest and most beautiful home on this part of the continent, have a staff that’s larger than the population of many smaller European countries, the finest china dishes, the most delicate glass goblets . . . and yet you use these . . . these paper napkins! It’s appalling! And ketchup and mustard bottles right on the table, too.”
“This is a ranch, after all,” Hearst said amiably. “We can’t get too far above ourselves.”
“Some of us can,” Lulu heard Emerson mutter beside her, but she couldn’t tell who he was referring to.
“Oh, dear me, I’m just teasing you, Mr. Hearst,” Louella said, not pushing her criticism too far. Even a favorite could fall. “I think it is charmingly unpretentious. If you don’t mind, I’ll even write about it in my next column.” To show her approval, she snatched up a bottle of ketchup and prepared to desecrate her meal.
But the second she opened the top, the ketchup exploded in a red volcano, covering her and everyone around her with a spray of tomato gore. She screamed, then tried to laugh because she knew she was supposed to, but failed miserably. She dabbed at her silk and chiffon gown, but it only made it look more like blood on her chest.
“Baking soda in the ketchup bottle,” Marion howled. “A classic.” No one claimed credit though. They didn’t want Louella as an enemy.
The scarlet image, so familiar to Lulu, made her feel momentarily queasy. Ruby had looked like that, with the blood of her gunshot wound blossoming on her breast. Added to her duck-induced nausea, she really didn’t think she could make it to dessert. And there went John Emerson’s napkin again, so she was in for another feeling-up.
Regretfully, she gave Freddie’s toes a last caress and slipped her foot into her shoe.
“Excuse me,” she said, pushing her chair back and standing.
John, who had been in an awkward position with his attempt to subtly reach Lulu’s leg, fell sideways to one knee on the floor as Lulu stood. He reached for the table to catch his balance, and caught Lulu’s wrist instead. A delicate bracelet of pearls, given to her by Lux Studio head Niederman to mark the signing of her new contract, broke, and the gems clattered to the floor.
“How clumsy of me,” John said, managing to sneak in another fondle. A girl can only take so much, even in Hollywood, so Lulu stepped down hard on his hand before she knelt and tried to pick up the pearls.
Undeterred, John stooped to help her, brushing her hip.
Lulu screamed!
“I was only being friendly,” John whispered.
But Lulu wouldn’t stop screaming. She staggered back, pointing under the table.
Freddie launched himself over the centerpiece and was at her side. He flung back the tablecloth.
Underneath the table, still and staring and cold, was the body of Juliette Claire, her bare foot splayed near Lulu’s chair.
Just then the door burst open and an auburn-haired young man strode in.
“Sorry I’m late, everybody. What did I miss?”