“I promise.”
Adelaide hung up the phone and stood quietly for a moment. Knowing that a powerful director was in the audience and that he was in the process of casting a new picture that involved a psychic went far toward explaining why Zolanda had given that last shocking performance. But something didn’t feel right. Why had Paxton gone to such dramatic lengths to set the scene for Zolanda’s death? Why not simply drug her, push her off the roof, and let the authorities conclude that she had taken her own life?
Why make Zolanda believe that her dreams might come true, that she had an opportunity to showcase her talent for a powerful director?
Zolanda’s carefully staged death had all the hallmarks of a carefully plotted act of revenge.
Adelaide contemplated the hatbox.
The kettle was whistling. She crossed the kitchen and took it off the stove but she did not bother to pour the water into the pot. Instead she went to the table, opened the hatbox, and took out the journal.
Each entry listed only a set of initials, a date, a note about the form of the blackmail material—letter, photo, diary—and a number that corresponded to a particular sealed envelope. The night before, Jake had quickly discovered the packet containing Elizabeth’s diary because he had recognized her initials and the date when she had given the extortion materials to Zolanda.
The remaining initials and dates meant nothing at first glance. Adelaide realized that she would have to go through the journal line by line and open each corresponding packet to see if there were any clues to the identity of the killer.
She decided to start from the most recent entries and work back toward the oldest. She was prepared for several hours of work, but in the end the answer leaped off the page.
The third most recent entry was annotated with a cryptic abbreviation: Pt. File. The accompanying initials meant nothing—J. T. But the date was approximately four months before she had been kidnapped and locked up at Rushbrook.
The Duchess had mentioned that Patient A had vanished a few months before Adelaide arrived at the asylum.
A rush of dark energy flooded through her. She went through the envelopes in the hatbox until she found the right one. Ripping it open, she dumped the contents on the table. She picked up the first one. And nearly stopped breathing when she realized she was looking at the sanitarium record of Patient A. There were several pages of Ormsby’s detailed notes.
Patient A lapsed into another delirium following the third dose . . .
Patient A experienced strong hallucinations again today . . .
Patient A was cooperative for a time and then abruptly became hysterical . . .
Orderlies report that Patient A hallucinated all night again. Can’t risk giving her a sedative because of the chance of inducing a coma . . .
There was far more information on the first test subject. She was a female. She had signed the commitment papers voluntarily. She had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. When she had arrived at Rushbrook, she was accompanied by a friend who insisted that the patient be admitted under an assumed name.
And just to complete the blackmail file there were some photographs of Patient A in a Rushbrook Sanitarium gown. Her face was disconcertingly slack, as if she had been drugged, but Adelaide could see the helpless rage in the woman’s eyes.
In one of the photos, she was sitting on the edge of a hospital bed. The gown was hiked up to her waist. She was not wearing anything underneath. Her legs were spread wide. Calvin Paxton, his trousers down around his ankles, stood between her thighs.
In the next photo Gill was the one who had been photographed raping the helpless, drugged woman.
Adelaide dropped the files on the table, jumped to her feet, and rushed across the kitchen to seize the phone.
There was no dial tone. The line had been cut.
She had to get out of the house.
She grabbed the car keys and yanked open the kitchen door.
Vera Westlake emerged from the shadows at the side of the doorway. She had a gun in her right hand.
“Not another step,” Vera Westlake said. “I can’t miss. Not at this distance.”
Chapter 53
For some bizarre reason, Adelaide’s first thought was that Vera looked like the movie star she was, as if she was acting the role of a desperate woman who was prepared to kill. But the gun in her hand was all too real.
She was fashionably dressed in a pair of trousers, a snug-fitting sweater, and a pair of blue and white oxfords. For once she was not wearing her trademark monochromatic color scheme. Her hair was mostly concealed beneath a scarf that was knotted under her chin. She wore a pair of dark glasses that were probably designed to make her appear anonymous but which only called attention to the profile of the most beautiful woman in Hollywood.
Adelaide stared at the gun, transfixed for a couple of heartbeats.
“I always wondered what happened to Patient A,” she said. “Why don’t you come in and have some tea. We have a lot to talk about, don’t we?”
Vera moved through the doorway and stopped. She glanced at the hatbox.
“You found my Rushbrook files, didn’t you?” she said.
“Yes. Zolanda had them.”
“That bitch. After I drugged her, she said she wanted to tell me a secret. I asked her what that was. She laughed hysterically and said that she had my Rushbrook files. She said she had planned to hold them until my career was at its height and then demand a fortune for them. I was stunned. I had assumed the files were still safe at Rushbrook. I asked her where she kept them but by then she was no longer making sense. She told me the truth but only part of it. She said the files were in a hatbox, but she never said where the damned hatbox was located.”
“Daydream is very problematic when used as a truth serum,” Adelaide said.
Vera made a small sound of disgust. “Evidently that’s especially true when it’s combined with booze, because I sure couldn’t get a straight answer out of Zolanda that night. After she went off the roof, I searched the villa. When I didn’t find the files, I dared to hope that they had been a figment of Zolanda’s hallucinations. I was wrong, obviously.”
“Zolanda had help going off that roof, didn’t she?” Adelaide said. “You told her that an important director was in the audience and that he was looking for a fresh face to play the role of a psychic.”
“I wrote the whole damned script for her last prediction,” Vera said softly.
“How did you convince her that you were going to make her big dream come true? She had no reason to trust you. After all, she had betrayed you in the worst possible way.”
Vera smiled a humorless smile. “Zolanda was a good actress but I’m better. I allowed her to think that I was grateful to her for taking me to Rushbrook. I let her believe that I didn’t remember the rapes and the hallucinations, that I was sure the drug had actually cured me. I even convinced her that I was obsessed with Paxton. When I told Zolanda that I wanted to repay her by arranging for a famous director to see her act onstage, she bought the whole story.”
“You’re right,” Adelaide said, “you really are a brilliant actress. But you also had one big advantage, didn’t you? Zolanda desperately wanted to believe you.”
“It was pathetic, really. After the performance I called her to tell her that I had some good news but that I needed to give her the details privately because everything about Holton’s next film is a secret. I told her that she should make sure her assistant was not around.”
“When Leggett was out of the way, you went to the villa.”
“Zolanda was thrilled,” Vera said. “I told her that the director had left the theater looking for a phone. He wanted to call his secretary immediately and tell her to make an appointment for a screen test for the psychic to the stars.”
“Zolanda believed every word you said because she wa
nted to believe that she was going to become a star.”
“We grew up in the same small town. We traveled to Hollywood on the same train. We stayed in the same shabby boardinghouses while we tried to get those first screen tests. I made it but Zolanda didn’t. Yes, I was offering her the one thing she craved more than anything else in the world.”
“She was jealous of you.”
“You could say insanely jealous.” Vera’s eyes were bleak. “But it took me a while to realize that. As I told you, she was a good actress. I’ll give her that much. She just didn’t have the look the directors want. I knew she was making money with her psychic routine. I thought she was content. I never understood the depths of her hatred and jealousy until the night she took me to the Rushbrook Sanitarium and handed me over to those two monsters, Gill and Paxton.”
“The paperwork says you signed the voluntary commitment papers.”
“I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Vera said. “The gossip magazines had declared me the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. Thanks to Dark Road I was an overnight star. I should have been on top of the world. I had everything I could want, but I was more depressed and anxious than I had ever been in my life. I was contemplating suicide.”
“But you didn’t want the studio to know.”
“I didn’t dare let them think that I was mentally unstable. I couldn’t see a doctor in Los Angeles, let alone check myself into a hospital for treatment. There are no secrets in that town. So I called the woman I believed was still my best friend from the old days, the one person I thought I could trust.”
“You called Zolanda.”
“She picked me up at my home and drove me all the way to Rushbrook.”
“She knew all about the Rushbrook Sanitarium because she was dealing drugs for Paxton and Gill,” Adelaide said.
“Yes, but at the time I didn’t know about the drug connection. When we got to Rushbrook, that bastard, Gill, was waiting for us. I was admitted under an assumed name. At the time I really believed that Zolanda was doing me a great favor. Gill gave me an injection, a strong sedative. I woke up in a room at the end of a long hall on ward five.”
“That’s almost exactly how I got to ward five, except that it was my fake husband who had me committed.”
“I still remember the screams at night,” Vera said.
“So do I. Nights were always the worst.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Eventually, Vera continued with her story.
“I’m not sure what they had in mind when I first arrived, but it didn’t take long for Gill and Ormsby to decide that I was an ideal test subject for Daydream. I wasn’t insane like the others on that floor,” she said.
“That’s how you became Patient A.”
“Gill planned to sell the drug to anyone who could pay the price for it. But Paxton had even greater ambitions. He hoped to use the drug to control powerful people—wealthy industrialists, senators, maybe the president.”
“Talk about hallucinating.”
“They weren’t altogether wrong about the drug, were they?” Vera said. “It does work as they thought, at least to some extent. In addition to being a strong hallucinogen, it makes a person susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. How do you think I got Zolanda up on that roof?”
“Did you push her off the parapet?”
“No,” Vera said. “There was no need to go that far. She started seeing things in the darkness. She panicked and fell. But in the end I made certain that she understood exactly why I was there.”
“What about the others? Ormsby, Leggett, Gill. Even Paxton is dead now. They went down like dominoes. In the end the entire drug ring was destroyed. That was not a coincidence, was it? You wanted revenge on all of them. You succeeded in destroying them.”
“I admit I owe you and Jake Truett for Paxton’s death. I had other plans for him but you took care of that problem for me. As for Ormsby, Gill, and Leggett, it wasn’t hard to convince Paxton that he didn’t need any of them. He was so sure that I wasn’t very bright. He was also convinced that the Daydream had left my nerves in a very fragile state. I let him think that I needed him in order to survive the stress of Hollywood.”
“He believed you.”
“Yes.
“Paxton was convinced that he was controlling you,” Adelaide said. “He never realized that you were manipulating him.”
“He was only too happy to get rid of the others. He had his own grand plans for Daydream.”
“I know what happened to Ormsby,” Adelaide said. “Tell me about Thelma Leggett.”
“Leggett called me after she went into hiding. She told me that she had my Rushbrook records. She said she would release them to the press if I didn’t pay blackmail. I agreed. She ordered me to leave the first payment in an amusement park in a small town on the coast.” Vera gave an elegant shrug. “I sent Paxton, instead.”
“You knew he would probably kill her.”
“Yes, of course. I also knew that he would grab the stash of blackmail materials, including my records. But I knew he would keep quiet because he had as much to lose as I did if those records hit the headlines.”
“I assume it was also Paxton who talked Gill into drugging Conrad Massey and sending him to that pier to murder Jake,” Adelaide said. “Massey was supposed to shoot Jake and then use the gun on himself.”
“That was the plan. But I knew it would probably go badly for Massey and Gill.”
“Because the drug is inherently unpredictable?”
Vera smiled. “And because I had a hunch that Jake Truett was too smart to get himself killed at a late-night rendezvous with a drug-crazed man.”
“You were right,” Adelaide said. “But why did Paxton want to murder Conrad Massey?”
“Massey didn’t know much about Daydream but he knew enough to be dangerous. He could be counted on to keep quiet as long as he had control of your inheritance. But it had become clear that he had lost you to Truett, and that meant he would soon lose your money. That made Paxton very nervous. He became frantic when he found out that Massey had survived the meeting with Truett. He knew that if Massey pointed the cops at Gill, Gill would, in turn, point them at Dr. Paxton, diet doctor to the stars.”
“So Paxton got rid of Gill that same night.”
“And then he joined me at the Paradise,” Vera said. “He wanted to establish an alibi in case he needed one. After he left the Paradise I went back to my villa. I assumed Paxton had gone back to the Burning Cove Hotel. But I got an uneasy feeling early this morning. I telephoned his villa at the hotel. When there was no answer, I suspected that he was up to something. I was worried that he had gone after you again.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried calling you here. When neither you nor Truett answered, I did the only thing I could think of—I telephoned the Paradise Club. Luther Pell was not there but whoever answered the phone said he would get a message to him.”
“That explains why Luther telephoned the Rushbrook police early this morning,” Adelaide said.
“I know it probably doesn’t matter to you, but I never wanted you to get killed. I didn’t know that Paxton intended to murder you the same night he killed Ormsby at Rushbrook. I didn’t realize at first that you were the reason Paxton and Zolanda and Thelma Leggett had all made the sudden decision to travel to Burning Cove. But I realized that the location offered a perfect opportunity for me to set my plans in motion. You may not believe it, but I didn’t even know that you were Patient B, let alone that you had escaped Rushbrook—not until the morning after Zolanda jumped off that roof.”
“You didn’t know that Paxton planned to kidnap me or kill me that same night?”
“No,” Vera said. “Not until the next day. Up to that point I had been obsessed with my revenge. It was all I could think about. But the day after Zolanda went off th
at roof, I overheard some of Paxton’s phone call to Gill. That was when I realized exactly who you were. By then it was obvious that Jake Truett was more than he seemed—he was friends with Luther Pell, after all. It was also clear that Truett was going to keep a close eye on you. I hoped he could keep you safe.”
“You knew there had to be some reason why a man like Jake Truett would take a personal interest in a tearoom waitress.”
Vera smiled a cool smile. “Truett is not the only one with hidden depths. You are a very brave, very resourceful woman, Adelaide. You have no idea how much I admire you for pulling off that escape from Rushbrook. I understand why Mr. Truett is so interested in you.”
“If you admire me so much, why are you holding that gun on me?”
“Because I am well aware that you have no reason to trust me or help me. Where is my patient file?”
“It’s there on the table.”
Vera did not lower the gun, but she moved to the table and used her free hand to riffle through the contents of the file. She froze when she saw the photos.
“Those bastards,” she whispered.
“Don’t worry, the negatives are there as well,” Adelaide said. “Gill and Paxton raped you while you were on the drug.”
“Night after night. Back at the start they considered the photos trophies. They were having sex with a famous star. But they also realized they could use the pictures as blackmail to control me.” Vera looked up from the file. “Did Gill and Paxton rape you, too?”
“No.”
“I wonder why not.”
“I realized right away that I dared not sleep at night,” Adelaide said. “I wasn’t afraid of Gill and Paxton. They didn’t have any interest in me, not in that way, probably because I wasn’t a star and, therefore, not a potential blackmail target. But I was terrified of the night orderlies so I stayed awake while they were on duty. Every time they came near my door I pretended to hallucinate wildly. To be honest, it wasn’t always an act. The drug did cause me to hallucinate. The orderlies thought I was insane. I think they were afraid of me. Maybe Gill and Paxton were, as well. After all, they had no way of knowing exactly how the drug was affecting me.”