The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Melodie Johnson Howe Another Tented Evening from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Maurice Hamlin peered out from the party tent that covered a grassy section of his vast backyard. His shrewd eyes came to an uneasy rest on the Ferris wheel. It spun around in a blur of colorful lights. Well-dressed men and bejeweled women seemed to sit as high as the moon in their swaying chairs. They laughed and waved to one another with that slight embarrassment adults feel when they think they should be enjoying themselves more than they really are.

Disgusted. Hamlin turned his assessing gaze back to the interior of the tent and surveyed the frolicking clowns, the mimes frozen in mocking imitations of his guests, the balloon sellers, the cotton-candy vendors, and the white-jacketed waiters serving Moët & Chandon champagne.

Hamlin had a familiar look in his eyes; the look of a producer whose movie has gone over budget and out of control. It was an expression I had seen many times in my years of being an actress. But this was not one of Hamlin’s movies; this was his wife’s fortieth birthday party.

“It’s costing me a fortune. Where the hell is she, Diana?” he demanded.

“It’s an important birthday. It’s not easy for some women.” I spoke from experience.

“The party’s been going on for almost an hour. Robin’s the one who wanted all this.”

He tilted his round head toward me. His hair was obviously dyed a reddish-brown color. Hamlin didn’t stay up nights worrying about the loss of subtlety in his search for youth, money, and a box office hit.

“Oh, God. I can’t believe I’m married to a forty-year-old woman.” He eyed a lithe redhead swaying past him. A blue balloon was tied by a long string to the thin silvery strap of her low-cut dress. Printed on the balloon was HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBIN.

“Will you go hurry her up, Diana?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Producers never do.

“I hope Robin doesn’t sing tonight,” he mumbled, walking quickly away to catch up with the young woman. I couldn’t remember her name but she had done two movies and was poised to “make it big” or to disappear. It was another tented evening in Hollywood.

I made my way across the sparkling black AstroTurf, grabbed two glasses and a champagne bottle from a waiter’s tray, and stepped out of the tent.

“Diana!”

It was Joyce Oliphant. She had just been named head of Horizon Studios. I knew her, many years ago, when she and I were the last of the starlets.

“Congratulations, Joyce.”

“I didn’t know you’d be here.” She meant: I thought you were out of the business and no longer important enough to be invited to the Hamlins’.

Forcing her thin lips into a smile, she purposely did not introduce me to the men standing on each side of her. This was not just a lack of good manners. This was intended to intimidate, to make me feel ill at ease. Their eyes hunted the party for more important people.

“What are you doing with yourself?” She tossed her highlighted brown hair back from her lined, tense face. Her hair was too long for her age. It’s difficult for some women to let go of the decade of their youth — ours was the sixties — no matter how successful they are in the present.

“I’ve got a small role in Hamlin’s next picture,” I said.

“I heard you had gone back to work. I do miss Colin.”

And once again I felt that sharp, isolating pain of loss. Colin was my husband. He had died of a heart attack just fourteen months ago.

“I miss his wit,” Joyce continued. “Where has all the wit gone?” Her greedy eyes searched the yard as if she could pluck wit from one of the guests’ heads. “Colin had it. There are times, Diana, when a script isn’t working, I want to pick up the phone and say get me Colin Hudson, the greatest writer Hollywood ever had.”

“I wish you could,” I said.

One of the men whispered in her ear. New prey had been found and she and I had talked too long. A conversation at a Hollywood party should not last over thirty seconds.

“We’ll talk. God. I hope Robin doesn’t sing tonight.” Her Chanel shoulder bag, dangling on a gold and leather strap, hit me in the stomach as she spun away.

I was a middle-aged woman, still good-looking enough for a middle-aged woman who was starting over in a business meant for very young women. I had no choice but to work. Colin and I had spent everything he had earned. No regrets. Besides, I had three things in my favor: I could act. I had contacts, and I knew how to play the game.

The Ferris wheel turned and the music blared as I made my way up the veranda steps to the enormous neo-Mediterranean house that curved like a lover’s arm around a mosaic-lined pool.

“Hello, Diana.” Oscar Bryant, my ex-business manager, stood smoking a cigar. Next to him, lurking in the shadow of a banana palm, was Roland Hays, the director.

“How are you, Oscar?”

“Still hoping you’ll go out with me.”

Dating your ex-business manager would be like dating your exgynecologist. He knows too much about your internal affairs.

“You know Roland Hays, don’t you?” He turned to Hays. “This is Diana Poole.”

The director was a slight man with receding black hair. He had a talent for getting the studios to make his movies even though they never turned a profit. For this reason he was referred to as an artist. His evasive dark eyes almost looked at me.

“Colin Hudson’s widow,” Oscar explained my existence.

“Great writer,” the director muttered. “God, I hope Robin doesn’t sing tonight.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Have you ever heard her sing?” Oscar asked.

“No.”

“Wait. Wait.” He stared at the glasses and champagne bottle in my hands. “What’s all that?”

“Robin’s having trouble making an entrance.”

He opened the French door for me. “Maybe you should just leave her up there.” He chuckled.

“Better for all of us.” The director stepped farther back into the swordlike shadows of the palm.

The house was eerily quiet in contrast to the noise outside. Contemporary art haunted the walls. My high heels clicked out their lonely female sounds as I made my way across a limestone floor to the stairs.

I’d met Robin Hamlin six months ago in acting class. I had gone back to brush up on the craft I had left when I married Colin. I have to admit — and these things are important to admit — I would not be walking up these stairs, and I would not have made friends with Robin in acting class, if she were not Maurice Hamlin’s wife. I say these things are important to admit because at least I’m not lying to myself. Not yet, anyway. As I said, I know how to play the games.

There was a side to Robin that was spontaneous and delightful. There was another side that was petulant, insensitive, and demanding. But she had thought of me for the role in her husband’s new movie and got me to read for him and the director. In Hollywood that makes her a person of character. There was also something poignant about Robin. At the age of forty she still dreamed, like a young girl dreams, of being a movie star, a performer, or just famous. Her husband had given her some small roles in his movies. And that’s all they were — small roles doled out by a powerful husband to his wife.

I made my way down the long hallway to her bedroom suite.

“Robin? It’s Diana,” I announced to the closed door. “I come bearing champagne. Robin?” I waited. “Robin? Maurice is worried about you.”

I tapped the door with my toe. I pushed it with my foot. It opened. I stepped into a mirrored foyer. My blond hair, black evening suit, one strand of pearls, red lips, reflected in a jagged kaleidoscopic maze.

“Robin? It’s Diana.”

A mirrored door opened. Robin stood there holding a sterling silver candelabra. Two of the four candles were missing. The ones that remained were tilted at a funny angle. Her black hair caressed her bare shoulders. The famous diamond and emerald necklace that Maurice had given Robin for her last birthday dazzled around her long, slim neck. The necklace and the candelabra were her only attire.

“Nice outfit,” I said.

“Thank God. Diana. Come in here quick.”

I followed her into the bedroom. She locked the door. Setting the bottle and the glasses on her mauve, taffeta-skirted vanity, I saw William DeLane reflected in the beveled mirror. Fully clothed, he leaned against the white velvet headboard. His misty gray eyes, full of surprise, stared into mine. I whirled around. The right side of his head was caved in. Blood spattered the white coverlet and his green jacket. Little drops of blood dotted the headboard near his thick brown hair. I didn’t have to check his pulse to know he was dead. On the floor next to the bed was a white cocktail dress. Blood streaked the shimmery fabric. “I ruined my dress.” Robin stamped her foot. Her implanted breasts never moved.

“Jesus Christ, Robin, what happened?”

Her voice went off into a whine. “I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry.” She took a deep breath and didn’t cry.

I pried the candelabra from her hand and set it on a table between two lavender-striped chairs.

“It doesn’t go there. It goes on the mantel.” She gestured toward an ornate marble fireplace.

“Robin, that’s William DeLane.” DeLane was a young and very successful screenwriter.

“Don’t you think I know that? At least give me credit for knowing who I killed. Nobody gives me credit.”

“Let me get Maurice.”

“No. Don’t you dare.” She grabbed a silk bathrobe off a chaise longue, slipped it on, and sat down.

“I need to think this out.” Her beautiful but remote violet-colored eyes studied me. “DeLane said you two went out last week.”

“We had dinner together.” With a shaking hand I poured champagne into the two glasses and gave her one. “He wanted to talk with me because I was Colin’s wife. Widow. He wanted to know how Colin lived and worked.”

“Why?” She crossed her long bare legs. Perfectly manicured toes glistened red.

“I think he was searching for some kind of an example, or a mooring. Some sort of image to hold on to.” I took a long swallow of the champagne and avoided DeLane’s shocked eyes.

“You mean like a father image?” she asked earnestly.

“More like a male muse. A creative guide in the jungle of Hollywood. He fell his own success was based on sheer guts and ego.”

“Isn’t everyone’s?” Her remote expression became more intent. “Did he talk about me?”

“Yes. He told me he was having an affair with you. His exact words were: ‘I’m having an affair with Maurice Hamlin’s wife.’”

“But it wasn’t enough, was it?”

“He was questioning his relationship to his success. Not his relationship with you,” I said carefully, knowing that sex and success were so intermingled in Hollywood that it was difficult to discuss one without the other.

She turned and peered at DeLane. “Why would anybody question success?”

I forced myself to look at him. God, he was so young and such a hack. There was a time when Hollywood turned talented writers into banal, soulless creatures. Now they arrived in town without souls. They arrived schooled in the clichéd and eager to be rewritten.

“He’s had three hit movies,” I explained. “And he couldn’t tell the difference between the first movie and the third movie. He felt that his words had no meaning. No connection to anything or anybody. Most of all they had no connection to himself. Why did you kill him. Robin?”

She didn’t answer. I opened a pair of French doors that led out onto a narrow foot balcony. I could see the spinning Ferris wheel and hear the music and the laughter of the guests inside the lent. I took a deep breath and watched Maurice embracing a tree. I looked again. A blue balloon floated out from under a leafy limb. I realized that between him and the tree was the redhead actress, whose chances for making it were looking better. I closed the doors.

“DeLane sneaked up here to give me my birthday gift.” Robin gestured toward a stack of leather-bound books piled on the floor near the bed. “The complete works of Ernest Hemingway.”

“You killed him because he gave you the complete works of Ernest Hemingway?”

“No. But why give me some macho writer’s books?”

“I think he was trying to give his own life some meaning.”

“But why give me Hemingway’s books? Do you see what I mean? Why me?” Her voice quivered. She stood and began to pace, stopped, thought a moment, then went to her closet and pulled out a yellow dress. She grabbed some pantyhose from a drawer.

“Do you remember who I was having an affair with on my last birthday?” she asked, wiggling into the pantyhose.

“I didn’t know you then.”

“Philip Vance.”

Philip was a featured player. Not a star, not a character actor, but always working and always listed around fifth place in the credits.

“Do you know what he gave me for a present?” Robin pulled open another drawer and took out a rhinestone pin from a small velvet box. The brooch was in the shape of a heart with a ruby arrow piercing it.

“It’s cheap but I love it,” she said, sounding like a teenage girl.

I knew the pin well. Philip had given me one fifteen years ago. I never wore it. Philip had been giving out these rhinestone pins for twenty years and always with the same line: “I can’t afford diamonds but the heart is real.” He counted on the expensive taste of his conquests. Knowing his ladies, as he called them, would never wear anything so obviously inexpensive, he was free to give the same pin to his next lady.

“It’s not that I have to have anything expensive,” Robin said. “Just something that’s sentimental. Something that means I was loved. ‘I can’t afford diamonds but the heart is real.’” She stared sadly at the pin, then tucked it lovingly back into the drawer.

“Do you remember when we were in acting class together?” she asked, stepping into the yellow dress.

“Yes.”

“And Rusty, our teacher, told us to close our eyes and tell him what we saw? What we imagined? Do you remember what you saw?”

“No.”

“A bird with a broken wing on a flagstone patio. A man’s wrist and the sleeve of his white shirt turned back. Do you remember what I saw?”

“No.”

“Nothing. I saw nothing. And then Rusty asked me to describe the nothingness. Remember?”

“Yes?”

“And I asked how can I describe nothing? I mean, you can’t. The closest I could come was a sort of a grayish black. Nothing is nothing. Zip me up.”

I zipped her up.

“Oh, God, I didn’t want to wear this.” She turned on DeLane’s corpse as if he had commented on her dress. “He made me feel like nothing. I suddenly could see it. Feel it.”

“How did he do that, Robin?”

“He just couldn’t believe that when all was said and done, he was a writer who was having an affair with his producer’s wife. I could handle that. But he couldn’t. So he tried to make it more than it was. And he tried to change me. That’s when he made me feel like nothing.” She put on some lipstick and smoothed her hair.

“Change you into what?”

“He blamed Maurice for everything. He said it was his money and power that kept me from truly knowing who I was. I told him he was crazy, that he was talking about himself. Not me. I told him it was over. That I didn’t want to see him anymore.” She stared defiantly at herself in the mirror. “I turned forty today and told a man I didn’t want him. I didn’t need him anymore.”

She sat back down on the chaise longue and slipped her feet into bright yellow high heels.

“Then it should’ve been a great night. Why didn’t it just end there?” I poured her another glass of champagne.

“Because as I was leaving to go down to the party he said. ‘Please, do us all a favor and don’t sing tonight.’”

She tapped her long red nails against the glass, took another sip, and then slowly peered at DeLane.

“Why didn’t he want you to sing?” I asked.

“He said people laugh when I sing. I’ve never heard anybody laugh, Diana. I told him that. He was lying on the bed just like he is now. I was standing by the fireplace. He said it was an uneasy laughter. That if I sang I would remind my guests of how untalented they really are. And how much money they earn for being so untalented. I grabbed the candelabra, turned, and swung it at his head. Not just once, but a couple of times.” Her eyes moved from DeLane to me. “You’re going to call the police, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But not till after I sing. Promise?”

“All right.”

She stood, downed the last of her champagne, and walked slowly out of the room.

I poured myself another glass, opened the French doors, and stepped out onto the narrow foot balcony. I looked toward the tree. Maurice and the redhead were gone. Robin appeared on the veranda. She stopped and looked up in my direction and waved. I waved back. The emerald and diamond necklace shone like glass. Guests began to move toward her, surrounding her as if she were a movie star and not just another wife who had turned forty. They all disappeared into the tent.

The caterers wheeled a giant cake out onto the veranda. It blazed like a small brush fire. Christ, Maurice had them put all forty candles on the cake. They lifted it off the cart and carried it into the tent. A hush fell. I could hear applause then guests singing “Happy Birthday.” The Ferris wheel went around in a garish blur, its now empty carriages swaying under the cold eye of the moon. There was another hush. Then the sound of a piano. And soon Robin’s voice wafted up through the tent into the night sky. I didn’t know the song. Some rock ballad. She hit all the right notes, but she had a thin, wavering, unfeeling voice. DeLane was right. She was relentlessly untalented. But not any worse than some others who have made it on just sheer guts and ego. Not any worse than DeLane.

The tent reminded me of an evangelist’s tent. A place where people come to be told there is another world. A better world. Where people can believe that Hollywood will save them no matter what they do or how they do it. Her pathetic voice, unintentionally, questioned that belief.

I moved back into the room and again forced myself to look at the body of the young, successful DeLane. I couldn’t bear the surprised look in his eyes. After three hit movies his words had finally connected. I pulled the white silk coverlet over his face.