Countess Dracula (18 page)

The last thing he needed to do
.

But what
was
he to do?

First things first. He headed home, dumping the car on his drive.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said Williams, his manservant, as Fabio entered the house. ‘Which suit would you like me to prepare for this evening?’

This evening.

The party.

Fabio ignored the man and ran straight to his drinks cabinet to see if it might hold some of the answers.

INTERTITLE: ‘FABIO IS NOT THE ONLY ONE THINKING ABOUT ELIZABETH AND NAYLAND’

Detective Harrison was beginning to have very nasty thoughts indeed. They were complicated still further by the fact that nobody else in his department seemed to share them.

‘Let it go, Scotty,’ said Grierson, the detective who was supposed to be handling the case of Georgina Woolrich, the missing maid. ‘There’s nothing to it. She died of stupidity, walking around at that time of night. We’ll find her body soon enough and that’ll be that.’

‘It’s amazing that we have any criminals left,’ Harrison said, ‘what with all the hard work this department does.’

‘Screw you. You think you have time to do a better job, then by all means help yourself.’ Grierson dumped a shamefully thin card folder on Harrison’s desk and wandered outside to look menacingly at people for half an hour.

Harrison had gone through the few details of the Woolrich case. The blurry photograph, confiscated from one of the newspaper reporters, that alleged to show Georgina sitting with Frank Nayland and his wife was as useless as Brunswick had promised. It looked as if someone had jogged the photographer’s arm. The faces were so indistinct as to be little but smears.

What was it about these people? Harrison wondered. Was it that their fame made them known quantities, above suspicion simply because ‘That’s Frank Nayland, we all know Frank, he wouldn’t do something bad!’

Harrison had no such belief. As far as he could tell, the likes of Elizabeth Sasdy and Frank Nayland were only too capable of acting outside the law. Who could be surprised when even the police department seemed to encourage them to do so?

He had dug out Georgina’s home address and decided to pay her family a visit.

He could see why the girl might have chosen to hide her real address, a run-down block that looked like it was one hard winter away from ruin. Looking along the row of houses, Harrison was reminded – as he so often was – of Hollywood fabrication. It looked like a film set, left out in the rain after filming had finished, abandoned to rot and crumble. This was the way of America, he decided, where the glamorous and the grotesque stood a few short miles from one another.

He headed up the steps to the front door and pressed the upstairs-apartment bell. There was no reply so he tried the door and wasn’t in the least surprised when it swung open. Checking the lock he saw that the thing had been sheared in two.

Stepping inside, he found himself in a poky hallway, stairs leading up.

Already hot and sweaty from an afternoon of oppressive Los Angeles heat, he loosened his tie and began to climb.

The Woolriches’ apartment was on the top floor, because God hated policemen just like everyone else did. Harrison was surprised by the immaculate door: gloss black paint with a carved crucifix fixed top centre. He was entering hallowed ground.

He rapped on the wood, trying not to smile at the jaunty jig this encouraged the wooden Jesus to perform as he rattled on his sacrificial nail.

The door was opened by a small woman who looked as if she suffered as much as the figure she had on her door. She was one of those women, Harrison thought, who were so crushed by everything and everyone around them that they became smaller and smaller, juiceless raisins looking wistfully back on the time when they had been grapes.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked in a somewhat querulous tone that suggested she would be terribly surprised if she could.

He showed her his ID. ‘Detective Scott Harrison, LAPD. Just wanted to ask some follow-up questions about your daughter.’

She shrunk another inch. ‘My poor Georgina. Do come in.’

The apartment inside rebuked him for his previous snobbery. It was immaculate and well cared for, a perfect illustration of a place where people had made the very best of what they had.

‘Can I get you a drink of something?’ she asked, ‘I’ve made some iced tea if you like that.’

‘I most certainly do and would love a glass. Thank you, Mrs Woolrich.’

She nodded, as much at his formality as his admission of thirst.

‘Take a seat and I’ll fix you a glass.’

Harrison did as he was told, choosing a straight-backed chair near the window. He looked around the room, noting the religious pictures on the walls – cheap iconography, some of them clipped from magazines, he suspected – and the sparse furniture. There was little sign of personality beyond the obvious love of the Lord. It was an apartment in which the family existed rather than lived.

‘My husband isn’t here, I’m afraid,’ Mrs Woolrich said as she returned with his drink, placed alone on a large wooden tray. ‘He doesn’t really approve of my having visitors while he’s out but I don’t suppose he’ll mind since you’re the police.’ Harrison took the drink. ‘Though I will say he didn’t take kindly to the previous detective – a Mr Grierson, I think he said his name was.’

Harrison took a mouthful of the drink and immediately relished it. He decided to be as open with the woman as possible, if only because she made good iced tea. ‘Frankly, Mrs Woolrich, I don’t take all that kindly to him, either. That’s partly why I’m here.’

‘He couldn’t have been more dismissive of our Georgina had he tried,’ she said, taking a seat opposite Harrison. ‘I think he had already decided what she was like and no amount of facts to the contrary would sway him from that opinion.’

It was a fair judgement and he told her so. ‘That’s why I decided to take a little look into things. I don’t want to give any false hope, it’s perfectly possible that my colleague is right. Still, I felt it warranted a little more attention than it was given.’

Mrs Woolrich nodded and looked out on the street. ‘He was convinced she would be ashamed of living here. Maybe she is.’ She paused, reflected, then corrected her tense. ‘Was. I really don’t think there’s much point in hoping she’s still with us, do you?’

Harrison continued with his policy of honesty. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I think we would have found her before now if that was the case.’

She nodded. ‘Are you a religious man, Detective?’

‘Not really, my mother was but … I don’t know, this job sometimes makes you forget the higher concerns.’

‘I can imagine. Still, you should look to your God – he can be a great help at times. I’m sure he’s looking after Georgina now.’

‘That must be a relief.’

‘For her as well as for us. Still, it’s earthly matters that concern you. We must hope that whoever hurt her can be found so that they may not do so to another poor girl.’

‘That would be my hope.’

‘Of course, my husband thinks it’s the actor. But then he never did like him, or his wife …’ Mrs Woolrich gave Harrison a meaningful look. ‘Particularly his wife. She is not a moral woman.’

‘No,’ Harrison agreed. ‘You could call her many things but not that.’

‘I don’t want you to think we’re just a pair of mad old folk beating our Bibles and crying foul. The Lord gave us choice and she must live her life as she chooses. Still, my husband doesn’t trust them. He never did approve of Georgina working there. But times are hard and you find the work you can get. She was a good girl, she wouldn’t be so easily swayed by their charms.’

‘You don’t think she would have gone out with them?’

‘Oh, I don’t say that. Georgina was a girl and girls love glamour.’ The small woman smiled. ‘I’m not so old I don’t remember that. An opportunity to dress up, feel special. Yes. Georgina would have gone with them. Though I can’t say I understand why they wanted her to.’

Harrison said nothing, not wanting to stop her flow. He just raised an encouraging eyebrow.

‘Well, now, I loved my Georgina but she wasn’t from their world. For them everything’s about image and importance, isn’t it? It’s about being seen to be the best, the richest, the most important. Would a person like that really want to be seen with their maid? God may think we’re all equal but a great many of his children don’t agree.’

Harrison nodded. ‘It seemed out of character to me, too.’

‘Georgina would tell us about them, of course. She had nothing bad to say about the husband, Frank Nayland. He was, by all accounts, a quiet and reasonable man. The wife? Not so much. She had a temper on her, that one. She certainly wasn’t backwards in letting her staff know what she thought of them. When she could be bothered to acknowledge them at all, that is. Is that the sort of woman who thinks a night out with her maid is a good idea?’

‘No, Mrs Woolrich, it isn’t.’

‘And then there’s this business of her asking to be dropped off miles away. If she was wanting to hide where she lived she would have picked somewhere a little closer to home, don’t you think? She could have had him pull up outside the Balthazar Hotel. It’s only six blocks away and she’d have been home in twenty minutes.’

‘It doesn’t make much sense, does it?’

‘No, Detective, it doesn’t. I was at a loss to understand how your colleague thought it did.’

‘I think he was swayed by the fact that several eyewitnesses claim to have seen your daughter in the company of Mr Nayland and his wife.’

‘Any of them know my Georgina? It could have been anyone.’

Harrison agreed with her again. ‘You couldn’t say for sure that it was your daughter in the photograph?’

For the first time, Mrs Williams looked surprised. ‘Photograph?’

Surely not, Harrison thought. Even a man as lax as Grierson wouldn’t have been so ham-fisted as to not show her the photograph. Depends when it came in, he realised: he’d made his decision and couldn’t be bothered to make another trip out here just to show a blurry picture.

‘He didn’t show you?’ Harrison asked, opening the small file and pulling out the image. ‘A photographer took a picture of them all. To be honest with you it’s a terrible shot – they’re so blurred that it could be anybody.’

‘Blurred or not I’d know my daughter, Detective,’ she replied, taking the photograph from him.

‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘I suppose you would.’

‘And I’m certainly not looking at her now,’ announced Mrs Woolrich, offering the picture back to him.

‘Are you sure? I mean … forgive me, I don’t mean to doubt your word but this is vitally important. How can you tell that the woman in the picture isn’t your daughter?’

‘Because unless Mr Nayland is a lot shorter than I’ve been led to believe, the woman sitting next to him is a good foot too tall to be my Georgina. She would also never wear a dress like that.’

‘We believe they gave the dress to her.’

‘That’s as maybe but she’s obsessed about her bust.’ Mrs Woolrich seemed slightly embarrassed by this. ‘I suppose all girls are at that age. The truth of the matter is that she didn’t have one. My husband caught her trying to pad out her jumper when she went out to a dance. By God, he rained terror on her that night.’ She pointed at the picture again. ‘The woman in that picture clearly doesn’t have the same problem.’

No, Harrison conceded, looking at the blurred figure, she didn’t.

So they had lied. But then he had already known that, really. The whole business hadn’t made a lick of sense to him from the minute he’d first heard it. At last he had something to back up his suspicions.

‘So who was it?’ Mrs Woolrich asked. ‘And if they didn’t go out with my Georgina what became of her?’

‘A good question, Mrs Woolrich. Rest assured that I will be doing my very best to find out.’

‘I have nothing against the movies,’ she said, as if he had asked her opinion. ‘My husband says they’re the work of the devil but then he says that about so many things … Still, I wonder what it is about those pictures that seems to dazzle everyone so. For a business that should be all about seeing it does seem to drive so many people blind.’

Back at the station that blindness seemed more profound than ever.

‘So the mother says she doesn’t recognise the girl,’ Brunswick said, shrugging. ‘She has better eyes than most. A picture like that … that could be my wife for all I know and she’s five foot and a brunette.’

‘If that was your wife,’ said Grierson, still rankling at the suggestion that he had shirked his duty, ‘she’d be on her knees under the table.’

‘Screw you.’

Harrison ignored them. ‘I’m going over there to get things straight,’ he said. ‘To hell with who they are.’

‘At this time?’ Brunswick looked at his watch. The afternoon was creeping into evening. ‘They’ll be pleased to see you, I’m sure, while they get ready to hit the town and keep the gossip sheets filled.’

‘They’ll have to make time,’ Harrison insisted.

‘Who’s this we’re talking about?’ asked Flatley, a seedy little man who appropriately enough worked Vice. It was a standing joke in the department that he had found his perfect post, his shift playing out as a hobby rather than as work.

‘Elizabeth Sasdy,’ said Grierson, miming what he considered the actress’s greatest attributes.

‘Then you’ll be booted off the drive before you can even show them your warrant card,’ said Flatley. ‘They’re hosting a party there tonight and the guest list is as exclusive as hell.’

‘I’m a goddamned police officer!’ said Harrison. ‘I don’t need an invite!’

Flatley shrugged. ‘Yeah? See how far that gets you when you ring the bell.’

Harrison got up from his desk, disgusted by the lot of them. A party, was it? Well then, he’d just have to crash it.

THIRD REEL: THE PARTY

THE CAMERA TAKES A SLOW PAN ACROSS THE DUSTY BRUSH-LAND OF THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS. IT’S DUSK AND THE LIGHT IS FADING QUICKLY.

EVERY PIECE OF
civilisation is built on another. Nothing in this world is ever empty, clean or new. A few hundred years ago this whole coast was nothing but wide-open space. A place of nature and the indigenous men and women who lived off it. A simpler land, where man and beast coexisted effectively: one ate the other, the other fought back, both sides had their share of victories and meat for their bellies.