“Three negatives, Mr. Walker,” she said. She put them in my hand. “And, by the way, I’m real familiar with the subject matter of those paintings you’ve done. I know all those things the police would find if they came to get her. I know what the press would do with the story, too. But no one else will ever know, not if we make our little agreement, like I said.”
I held the strip of negatives up to the lamp. They were the most incriminating ones, all right. Belinda and I embracing. Belinda and I in bed. Me on top of Belinda.
And a stranger had walked through my house to get these, a stranger had broken into the darkroom and into the attic, gone through my things. But when had this happened? What was the precise date of the violation? How long ago had we lived with this false sense of security, Belinda and I both, while this other watched her, waited for his chance to break in?
I put the negatives in my inside pocket. I sat back making all those nervous little gestures you make when you are about to blow. I was rubbing the fingers of my left hand together, rubbing my chin with the back of my hand.
I tried to remember everything Dan had told me. OK, they weren’t covering it up for Bonnie. But they had covered it up nevertheless.
She had returned to the couch, and I was glad she wasn’t close to me. I did not want her to touch me. I didn’t like it that our hands might have touched when she gave me the negatives.
“Mr. Walker, you can have money from me in any reasonable amount that you need to take care of her—”
“I don’t need money. If you investigated me, you know I don’t need money.”
“Yes, that’s true. Nevertheless I want to give it to you, because she is my child and it’s my wish to provide for her, of course.”
“And what is the bottom line on time with this blackmail, this little sales arrangement, this—”
“It’s not blackmail,” she said, frowning slightly. But at once the few lines created by the frown disappeared. Her face was bland again, as devitalized as her voice. “And I told you, till she’s twenty-one is best. Until she’s eighteen, well, that is kind of imperative. She’s a child till she’s eighteen. No matter what she might think, she can’t take care of herself.”
“She’s been with me three months, Miss Blanchard.”
“Just a year and two months till she’s eighteen, Mr. Walker. You can do that much. You can keep her and those paintings of yours where no one will find them, no one will make a big fuss about it all—”
She stopped. The inner switch had been thrown again. But something was different. I thought maybe she was going to cry. I had seen Belinda’s face change suddenly, crumple almost magically into tears. But that didn’t happen. Instead her face remained listless, blank. And her eyes appeared to fog over. She was looking at me, but I could have sworn she didn’t see me. And the tears that did come were so slow that they were only a film. The light seemed to have gone out inside her.
“You’re a sane man,” she murmured, the words slower. “You’re rich, you’re steady, you’re good. You’ll never hurt her. You’ll look out for her. And you don’t want to hurt yourself.”
“Three months, Miss Blanchard, that’s how long I’ve known her. Anytime she gets tired of it, she can walk out.”
“She won’t do it. I don’t know what she told you, but I’d bet every cent I have that it was hell for her before she met you. She’s not going back to it. She has what she’s always wanted. And so do you.”
“And so you go back down to LA and you tell yourself everything’s hunky-dory, is that it? That your daughter is safe in my hands?”
The film appeared to settle where it was, glimmering behind the lenses of the glasses, and her expression dulled even more. Her mouth was half open. Slowly she looked away from me, as if she’d forgotten me. She just stared beyond me at the sterile emptiness of the room.
“What happened?” I asked. “What made her run? And why the hell would you do something like this—virtually turn her over to a man you don’t even know?”
No answer from her. No change in her.
“Miss Blanchard, since the moment I laid eyes on your daughter, I’ve been asking those kinds of questions. They’ve obsessed me night and day. Just last night I went behind her back into her private belongings. I found the movies she’d made with you. This morning I read your life story in one of those cheap paperbacks. I know about your marriage, the shooting, this television series—”
“And your lawyer,” she said in the same dead voice. “Don’t forget about your lawyer, Mr. Dan Franklin, asking all those questions in LA.” Beautiful. And didn’t it figure?
“All right.” I nodded. “I had my lawyer trying to find things out, too. But I still don’t know what made Belinda leave the way she did. And if you think I’m leaving this room without the whole story—”
“Mr. Walker you can’t really bargain with me. I’ve got the negatives, remember? All I have to do is pick up that phone and call the police.”
“Do it,” I said. She didn’t stir.
“Call the police just like you did when she left, Miss Blanchard. Call the papers, too.”
Very slowly, impossibly slowly, she lifted the cigarette to her lips. The tears were caught in her long black eyelashes, flashing for an instant like crystal beads. And there was a faint flush to her delicately shaded oval face, a faint quivering to her lips.
“Why didn’t you report it when it happened? You might have picked her up in a week if her picture had been in the papers. But you let her roam the streets for nine months.”
She laid the cigarette down in the ashtray as carefully as if it were a bomb about to go off. Then her eyes drifted to me again and settled and the glaze of tears shimmered so that for one moment her eyes were nothing but light.
“We had our people looking for her all over,” she said. “Night after night I went looking for her on my own. I went down myself on Hollywood Boulevard and I walked miles looking for her, and asking the kids about her, and showing them her picture. I went in flophouses and crash pads looking for her that you wouldn’t believe.”
“But you don’t want her back now that you’ve found her.”
“No. I don’t. I never wanted her back. Before she left I tried to send her off to school. I had her packed and ready to leave, but, no, she wouldn’t go. She was past all that. Nobody was going to lock her up in a school. When she was little, that’s all she ever talked about, wanting to be like other kids. But now she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Was that the unforgivable crime, Miss Blanchard, that she had grown up? Enough to unwittingly attract your husband into trying something he shouldn’t have tried?”
“The unforgivable crime, if you must know, Mr. Walker, is that she seduced my new husband in my house. And I caught her with him. And I tried to kill her for it. I aimed a gun right at her, and my husband got in front of her. Five bullets he took. Or I might have killed her the way I planned.”
My turn ro stop moving as if a switch had been thrown.
Panic returning, the rapid heartbeat, the blood rushing to my head.
She was watching me. Her face was a little more deeply colored. The tears were gone. But everything else was locked inside.
“You don’t know the relationship there was between her and me,” she said, voice even as ever. “She wasn’t just my daughter, she was my closest kin.” She smiled bitterly. “Don’t faint on me, Mr. Walker. She did it. Your Belinda. She’d been sleeping with him all along. I heard them talking to each other. I tell you, it was more that than the sight of it, the way they were talking. And I didn’t even understand the words, Mr. Walker. I’m referring to the tone of their’ voices. I’m referring to those little sounds coming through that door. I got the gun out of the night table and I went in there and I emptied it into that bed.”
I took out my handkerchief and slowly wiped the sweat from my forehead, my upper lip.
“Are you sure that she did it the way you—”
“Oh, she di
d it, Mr. Walker, and I know why she did it, too. It was all new to her, being a woman”—the smile became broader, more bitter-”you know, having the magic, the charm. Well, it’s old as the hills to me, Mr. Walker. I’ve been selling it one way or another ever since I can remember. Before I was a movie star, I sold it for a date to the prom. When we came back from the hospital, I said: ‘You get out of my house. You’ll never live under any roof with me again. You aren’t my child, you’re a stranger. And you’re going.’ And she said: ‘I’m going, but I’m going where I please.’”
“Maybe it didn’t happen the way you think.”
“She did it.” The smile faded. The voice slowed a little, though it had never been very rapid or loud. “And I know what she was thinking, what she was feeling. I remember being that young and that stupid. I remember doing things like that just to see what would happen, going after another woman’s husband just to see if I had the power to get him, to make a fool out of her. She became a stranger to me, all right, but she became a stranger that I understood real well.”
I shook my head. “Did you listen to her side of it?”
“She said if I tried to make her go off to school, she’d go to the police, she’d say he molested her. That’s what she said to me. She said she’d send him to prison for the rest of his life. She was leaving and better nobody try to stop her. She said just get out of her way or she’d go to the papers with it. She’d ruin everything.”
“And what if that’s what happened? He did molest her?”
“Not a chance, Mr. Walker. Not my daughter, Belinda. She was on the pill when she was twelve years old.”
“But you’re living with him after his part in this? She has to go, but he can stay?”
“He’s just a man,” she said. “I didn’t know him from Adam this time two years ago. All her life she lived with me. She came out of my body. He’s nothing. Put him in the right place, push the right buttons—he’s easy to forgive. Nothing to it.”
“A moral idiot, you’re talking about. A live-in animal.”
“What are you, Mr. Walker?” she asked. “What were you thinking when you took her to bed?”
“I wasn’t married to her mother,” I said. “I wasn’t living in her mother’s house. I wasn’t trying to make a mint off her mother in a television series. And that’s the crux, isn’t it, Miss Blanchard?” No answer.
“It was either side with him,” I said. “Or ‘Champagne Flight’ crashes on takeoff, right? It was a package deal the whole time, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t know anything, Mr. Walker,” she said calmly. “There’s a thousand lackeys like Marty Moreschi down there in Hollywood. But there’s one Bonnie. And Bonnie has made ‘Champagne Flight.’ Your idea isn’t even interesting.”
I studied her, confused by her seeming honesty, the way to her it all made sense. There was no defensiveness or bravado in her words.
But her face softened as I watched, becoming even more listlessly beautiful, like a portrait shot taken with a filter, all loveliness with quiet fire. Then her dark eyes brightened slowly, and the imploring look I’d seen a thousand times in her old films was suddenly there.
“I didn’t need to forgive Marty,” she whispered intimately. “I wanted to forgive him. And it meant a whole lot more than just having him or ‘Champagne Flight.’ It meant keeping a way of looking at things, Mr. Walker. Of caring about them.” She paused, and her expression became even more intense, more poignant. “It meant wanting to wake up again in the morning,” she said, “wanting to take the next breath. It meant caring about being alive, Mr. Walker, just to be with Marty and be working on that show. Soon as he gave me any means to make it up, I took it. I grabbed it. It was real easy, like I said.”
I saw the movement of her throat as she swallowed. I saw her eyes mist again. The full sculpted softness of her breasts and hips beneath the cashmere dress gave her a look of almost irresistible vulnerability.
“I don’t care who started it between them,” she said. “I don’t care whose fault it was. I don’t ever want to see her again.”
She stated at the carpet in front of her. She had folded her arms and bowed her head as if someone had struck her.
I didn’t answer her, and nothing could have made me answer. But I understood just what she was asking me to understand. I hated seeing it her way, but she had made me see it. And I couldn’t have lied to her. I knew just what she meant.
When Alex had tried to explain it, I had not heard it. But she brought it all home.
I had the strong feeling, too, that I would understand even better as the years passed, as I got older, when more battles had been lost and there were fewer and fewer things that had any true importance.
Yet I watched her without conceding. And my loyalty to Belinda never wavered. Dear God, she was fifteen when it happened. How much could she have understood?
I didn’t try to think it through. I just imagined myself on the highway driving south to Carmel and coming up to the little house at morning and Belinda being there.
And I felt a new terror for Belinda, that she seemed now more than ever alone. I ached for her. I ached to protect her from the hurt and the despair in this room. And maybe for the first time since I had laid eyes upon Belinda, I understood her, too. I did.
I knew now why she would never talk about any of it. And it really didn’t matter whose fault it was or who started it, just as her mother said. It was a disaster, that is what it was, a disaster for mother and daughter, and maybe only the two of them would ever know how bad it had been.
But this was not over. Not by any means. It would have been too convenient for me to walk out the door. And I’d be damned before I’d play this lady’s game. It was as dark and convoluted as everything about her. “What if you talked to Belinda now?” I asked. It was impossible to tell if she had even heard. “I could go get her, bring her here,” I said. “I’ve seen all I want to see of her,” she said.
The particular brand of silence in the room filled the void between us. Distant traffic. A faint music from the lobby of the hotel, which must have been there all along.
“Miss Blanchard, she’s your daughter!”
“No, Mr. Walker. You take care of her.” She looked up as if roused from a stupor, eyes red and sad.
“What if she needs you, really needs you?”
“Too late for that, Mr. Walker.” She shook her head. “Too late.” And her hushed voice had a chilling finality.
“Well, I can’t do what you’re asking me,” I said with a little finality of my own. “I can’t be a party to this little blackmail scheme. I won’t cooperate with you.”
Frozen again in her thoughts. Silent. Helpless.
“What’s it matter, Mr. Walker?” she said, looking up. “Nobody’s going to the police. You know that, don’t you? If she runs away, you call me. You’ll do that much, won’t you?”
“What if you’re wrong about all of it—”
“Take her away somewhere, Mr. Walker. Someplace where nobody will find her or those pictures you’re painting of her. Keep her out of the bright lights. Two years, three, it won’t matter. Then you can both do as you damn well please. I’d never use the negatives against you. Can’t you see that?”
“Then I’ll take them now, Miss Blanchard, if you don’t mind.”
I stood up. She did not move. She looked at me as if she didn’t even know who I was, let alone what I meant to do. “I’ll get them myself,” I said.
I went to her purse. I took out the envelope. Checked the contents. They were there, all right. I counted them. Then held one up to the light. Artist and Mocel. OK. I looked in the purse. Brush, wallet, credit cards, makeup. Nothing else of mine in there.
“You’re some blackmailer, Miss Blanchard,” I said. “Your thugs take anything else?”
She was staring at me. And I thought I saw her smile, but I couldn’t be certain. So many little things, indescribable things, can happen in a still face. Then very slowly she
stood up. But it seemed for a moment she couldn’t remember her intention. She appeared lost.
I reached out to steady her. But she moved past me to the desk by the floor-length window and she sat down and bent over slightly, leaning on her left elbow, as she wrote something on the hotel message pad.
“That’s my address and my private number,” she said, as she turned to give it to me. “If anything goes wrong, anything bad happens, you call me there and I answer, not some studio employee or some brother of mine who doesn’t think I can add two and two. You call me night or day if she ever runs away.”
“Talk to her.”
“And about that brother of mine—be careful.”
“He doesn’t know where she is?”
She shook her head. “He’ll never give up on finding her. Wants her locked up till she’s twenty-one.”
“For her sake or yours?”
“Both, I imagine. He’d lock up Marty, too, if I let him.”
“That’s consoling,” I said.
“Is it, Mr. Walker? What do you think he’d do to you?”
“But he wants it all kept quiet just the way you do, doesn’t he? No police and, God forbid, any newspapers.”
“Can’t say he does,” she said wearily. “He’d call in the French foreign legion and NBC and CBS if he could. But he does what I tell him to.”
“Good old Brother Daryl,” I said.
“Blood means a lot in my family, Mr. Walker. You don’t betray your own. And he’s my brother, not hers.”
“Well, since you tracked her right to my door, what’s to stop him from doing it?”
She didn’t answer right away. Then she smiled the little bitter smile again.
“Well, let’s just say I have connections that Daryl doesn’t have,” she said.
“Like what?”
Not Alex. Alex wouldn’t have betrayed me for the world. And George Gallagher? He wouldn’t betray Belinda, from all I’d heard.
“Daryl thinks she’s in New York,” she said. “He thinks she’s headed for Europe, to try to hook up with a director named Susan Jeremiah to make a picture. But even if he does find out about you, he’ll come to me before he does anything. If you don’t show those paintings of yours, that is. You do that, you bring everybody down on you. I’d have to come after you myself.”