Don't Speak to Strange Girls Read online

  He felt rage gorge up through the empty longing in his stomach. He was tied in knots. Where in hell was Joanne and why did she always have to lie to him? Why did she say she was too tired to see him and then go out with some other guy?

  Determinedly, he crossed the shadowed street and went into Joanne’s building. He heard music blaring from her apartment, and the sounds of a raucous party going on.

  He stood for a minute before pressing the bell, and then the girl he knew as Flo opened the door. She was drunk again.

  “Well, hello there, doll,” Flo said. “We haven’t seen you in a long time.” Perhaps, he thought, she was always drunk.

  “Come on in,” she cried, sagging against the door jamb.

  “No,” he said. He looked over her head into the crowded apartment. “Joanne. Is Joanne home?”

  “Aw, honey, I’m sorry. She’s not. She’s going to hate missing you, though. It’s just going to make her sick.”

  Sure, he thought, she’ll cry herself to sleep. She’ll even soak some guy’s pajama sleeve, crying herself to sleep… .

  Don’t

  Speak to

  Strange Girls

  Harry Whittington

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  Also Available

  Copyright Page

  chapter one

  CLAY STUART glanced at Sharon close beside him, head lowered, concealed beneath dark hat and veil, handkerchief pressed against her mouth. The genuine quality of her grief was his only comfort in this phony display at Ruth’s graveside in Forest Lawn.

  Surrounded by photographers and the curious — strangers drawn for every reason except to mourn Ruth — Clay stared at the minister but did not listen any more. Besides Sharon and himself, the knot of relatives and close friends under the canopy, only three people in this whole mob had known his wife well enough to mourn her death — Kay Ringling, Marty Hoff, Marc Shatner. The others had come hoping to glimpse Clay Stuart’s grief.

  He stood rail thin, tall, body sagging in black suit, sun glistening in the sweat on his forehead, brown hair thinning without the hairpiece.

  He found his mind shutting out this lush, sick-sweet scene and in his memory, like a movie dissolve, he was thirteen, watching the stark burial of his father on a bleak Nebraska plain.

  Clay had stood at his father’s graveside, not crying because males didn’t cry even in the presence of death in that barren country. The scalded land lay flat, starkly brown, hostile and without tears even at a burial. The funeral oratory was austere and without comfort. Death was fearful but ever-present on those plains; it was everywhere; habitation, vegetation slowly decaying in the broken red earth beneath an avenging sun.

  Suddenly Clay heard Sharon’s soft cry and she moved nearer against him, clasping his hand low at their sides where the strangers could not see.

  Clay felt his heart lurch, thinking Ruth’s death might accomplish what he’d always wanted if it brought their daughter closer to him. “I always wanted this,” he thought, “but like everything else, I never got what I wanted until I didn’t want it any more.” Maybe it wasn’t too late with Sharon. He hoped not.

  • • •

  The black Rolls Royce turned left on Barham Boulevard and Clay glanced at the red-gleaming roofs of Warners across the Los Angeles River, thinking about the commitment he had down there.

  He sat stiffly between stout Marty Hoff, his business manager, and Marc Shatner, his agent, on the back seat. Hoff was saying, “It was a fine funeral, Clay. You did everything for Ruth you could.”

  “No.”

  Hoff made a sad, clucking sound. “Now, don’t start that, Clay. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “Who started it?” Shatner said. “You started it, Marty.”

  “Shut up, Marc,” Hoff said. Faint moisture formed in his eyes and he scowled. He had loved Ruth because he came to know her well in these years; he and Ruth got along because they both loved Clay Stuart and wanted the best for him. He thought about Kay Ringling who would assume many of Ruth’s responsibilities and he shivered slightly. He pitied anyone who had to deal with Kay Ringling where Clay Stuart was concerned, and now he was pitying himself in advance. “I only mentioned it was a fine funeral. Nice. I mean — you got to go — it’s fine to know they give you so much.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Stuart said. He leaned forward and spoke to the chauffeur. “Fred, if there are reporters at the house, drive on — we’ll go down to the ranch.”

  “Clay. Now, Clay.” Hoff was sweating. “You can’t do that to those boys.”

  “I can’t look at them any more. I don’t want any more pictures.”

  Hoff’s voice was consoling. “Now, Clay, look at it this way. These photo-boys are communicating your grief to the public. The public wants to share. They got a right to share.”

  “No.” Stuart’s mouth was taut.

  Marc Shatner glared across him at Hoff. He didn’t care how many pictures they took. As Clay’s agent he accepted that Clay Stuart’s grief was no more a personal thing than any other facet of his life had been in the past — Good God, was it really thirty-two years? It really was, though nobody cared to face this truth, including Clay Stuart. Stuart had reached his highest triumph at thirty-five, and he clung to that peak, and when he died, he’d still be clinging to it.

  Shatner felt a rush of grief. Not for Ruth, but for himself and Stuart. Ruth was dead; it was cancer; she’d been dying for a long time. Some Hollywood columnists were already speculating in print who’d be the next Mrs. Clay Stuart — second wife of one of the dozen super-stars left in the business, so colossal TV couldn’t touch him or affect the grosses of his pictures. Line up girls, this boy is a catch. Hell, not a day over fifty-three. On the screen he photographs a youthful, suntanned thirty-five. Lines in his face? Dignity. Character.

  But Shatner had been watching Clay closely, at the cemetery, and now here at the car. Thirty years he’d known Clay Stuart — nothing he wouldn’t do for him, nothing he hadn’t done for him, knew all about him. And he had not suspected the truth. When Clay Stuart walked away from that grave he left part of himself there. And this was not as upsetting to Marc Shatner as was the fact that nobody, least of all Marc Shatner, had suspected Clay gave more than a casual damn about Ruth.

  “Talk to him, Marc,” Hoff pleaded. Behind his dark glasses, Hoff’s eyes were frantic. “He’ll listen to you.”

  “I’ll listen to nobody,” Stuart said. He spoke in that flat, measured way on screen and off. “I want to be by myself. Just for a while. Is that too much to ask?”

  “I think it is,” Hoff said. “Of course you grieve, Clay. But if you get back to work, this is the answer. Am I some nobody telling you these things, Clay? I been through these bad times. I’ve lost — loved ones. You tell me who loved your Ruth more than I did. But if you give in to your grief it is worse — on you, Clay. No. Work is the answer.”

  • • •

  The Rolls turned into the drive of Clay’s Beverly Hills home; one of his possessions; one that had al
ways seemed to him to belong more to Ruth, expressive of her in every way and never truly his. The split-level ranch-type showed the Spanish influence Southern California architects could not escape in the thirties. Its fourteen rooms were carefully planned so their grouping did not appear imposing beyond the low wall and banked shrubbery; the house didn’t betray its sprawling massive space except to a bird looking down on it from a eucalyptus tree, or to the tax assessor gazing upward at it. Before its white stone facade the drive was a pebbled semicircle through a half-acre completely carpeted with lovely tasteless odorless flowers Los Angeleans grew instead of lawn grass. Behind the house, the yard sloped gently across four acres to the abrupt brink overlooking a canyon of pine, rocks and bull-dozed homesites.

  The camera corps had preceded them. Clay walked through them without hurrying, with that measured pace the screen captured so profitably. He didn’t protest their flashing cameras but didn’t lift his head either, though they called to him and some were acquaintances of many years. He didn’t tell them to go to hell and he figured this was the friendliest side he could show them.

  • • •

  Shatner went into the library and poured himself a drink of I. W. Harper. After a moment Hoff came in with two blue-covered scripts in his arms. He put one of them on the polished desk.

  He looked around a moment and then placed the other as though it had been tossed by chance on the drum table under a reading lamp.

  Shatner carried his drink, examined the covers of the scripts without touching them.

  “It won’t hurt him any to see them when he comes in here,” Hoff said. His voice was on the defensive.

  Shatner read the title on the script under the reading lamp. “They’re both scripts on Man of the Desert,“ he said.

  Hoff nodded. “If only Clay will read it. The story is right for him. Like it was written for him.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “My advice to you,” Hoff said, “is that you encourage Clay to get back to work. It is what he needs. Instead of scoffing, let me see you tell him to get back to work.”

  “On Man of the Desert?”

  “It’s a good property,” Hoff said. “It will draw above everything he has ever done. We’re getting him a percentage of gross. We got a top director. If you are his friend, you will make him see all this.”

  Shatner shrugged. “Who’s his friend right now? Am I his friend? Me? I’m his agent.”

  • • •

  Clay Stuart walked slowly up the wide staircase. It had never seemed so damned far before. He must be getting old. Hell, he was getting old. But even as he thought it, he denied it, the rush of warmth eating through the grief in him.

  He couldn’t get old. There was no place out here for a leading man who got old. It had not been age that killed Ruth. He had to remember that. She was only forty-eight. No, he supposed she was fifty. She was three years younger than he was, though she’d looked ten years older there at the last.

  The funeral directors had done a masterful job on her. She looked wasted, nothing anyone could do about that, but at least she had looked less than a hundred years old lying in that casket. God. What difference did it make how she had looked? But a man didn’t live most of his life as a public commodity without concerning himself with public reaction, even at a time like this.

  Clay heard McEsters open the front door, heard it close. He knew without looking over his shoulder that Kay Ringling had come in. He sensed it when Kay was near.

  He paused, hand on the Newell post, feeling the erratic pound of his heart. The damned thing never had been any good — when Gable and Taylor and the rest had been going into the services, they turned him down. Now it lathered him to climb the stairs.

  He heard the subdued voices from below. Kay Ringling. Shatner. Hoff. They loved him, each was responsible for a piece of him, but he felt he never wanted to see them again. They reminded him, but no sense hating them for that. Everything in this house reminded him.

  Clay entered his bedroom and closed the door behind him. He pulled loose his tie, unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of his coat. Thank God Ruth had left this room alone except to furnish it simply and ruggedly.

  He tossed his coat over a chair, stepped out of his trousers. In jockey shorts and knitted undershirt, he stared at himself in the full-length wall mirrors.

  He was three inches over six-feet tall, though publicity releases made it more, still slender and hard, corded with muscles. The hair on his chest was graying and his temples were streaked with gray, too. He moved closer, staring at his tear-reddened eyes.

  He opened a closet door, found a ribbon-nylon shirt and slacks. He zipped the trousers, buttoned them but did not put on a belt. He left his shirt open half-way down his chest.

  He went through the connecting bath to Ruth’s room, not knowing why he went in there, what he was looking for — in here was the quiet elegance dear to Ruth’s heart. She had expended a lot of passion on this part of her existence.

  He paused beside the Angel Bed Ruth had had crated and carted home from France when they’d been on their honeymoon. He hadn’t spent much time in here. Sex hadn’t been the most urgent force of Ruth’s life.

  The sliding doors of the wide closets loomed vacantly. The place had been cleared of Ruth’s dresses, shoes, under-things. Hoff had ordered this done — not realizing every bit of furniture in this house screamed her name. Hoff believed if you ordered your mind to discard grief, it would do it. All a matter of discipline. God how he envied a man like Hoff.

  He saw a stocking that looked like something spun over the lower rung of a chair from eighteenth century France. He picked up the stocking, closing his fist on it. Funny, the way it had been left there, carelessly. That was the way it was with Ruth. The time they’d toured Europe, she’d left bits of her wardrobe in every hotel from London to Antwerp. And now she was dead and still she left part of herself in this room. Money and social position and someone to wait on her, the story of her life.

  It had angered Ruth when he’d been tidy on their honeymoon, putting away his own clothes. What would the servants think? “The surest way to let them know you’re nobody,” Ruth said, “is to be neat and put away your clothes … and I don’t like you to do it anyway, Stu … It’s so common.”

  A long time, Ruth, he thought. The girl who had everything all her life and the guy from a Nebraska farm — publicity releases called it a ranch. They’d had a good life, he saw now when it was lost and over, even if he’d always felt it lacking in spice and excitement. In those first years his friends made bets how long he and Ruth would last. Sometimes he made bets with himself. Ruth had disliked much in his life, hated hunting and fishing, and she had gone to his Nebraska home only once. Damned if she would tolerate the inconveniences.

  He turned slowly, as if looking at this room for the last time. He thought, I’m sorry, Ruth, if I hurt you, and I know I did, if I failed you, and God only knows how many times I did that.

  The knob on the hall door turned and he spun around guiltily.

  Sharon opened the door and stood on the threshold. “I was looking for you,” she said.

  Sharon had come into her twenties as if it were a fine and unexpected legacy, and there were all the pleasant touches of his lost little girl about her, face untarnished by shadow and arrestingly clear. There was an ingrained reticence in her that came from her mother, a faint questioning of everything, an innate appreciation of quality and mistrust of the phony.

  Clay shoved the stocking into his pocket, tried to smile.

  Sharon came forward slowly. “Don’t be ashamed, darling,” she said. “Of course you loved her. Don’t worry about it. Mother knew.”

  Clay drew the back of his hand across his mouth, wondering how Ruth could have known.

  He hadn’t even known himself.

  • • •

  Clay walked with Sharon along the hallway to the enclosed veranda across the north wing of the house.

  He kept his
arm about her, feeling the solid warmth of her body against him. Suddenly he never wanted to let her out of his sight again.

  Sharon took a deep breath, thinking the best way to approach her father was with a burst of words. She didn’t want to hurt him but she had to be honest with him. It would have been so easy to tell her mother. It was everything her mother would approve and understand.

  She moved away from Clay and walked across the bright parquet floors to the tall windows, forming the words on her mouth. But as she turned, he spoke: “I did love her, Sharon.”

  “Oh, I know you did.”

  “Sometimes I didn’t show it.”

  She gave a soft laugh. “Well, you were never half the lover around here that you were on Grauman’s screen.”

  “No.”

  There was a brief empty silence. She was thinking that Amory Darrow was almost as tall as her father, slender and athletic. There would never be the strength and character in Amory’s face that was in her father’s, but she had seen only a few men who had that, so it was no discredit to Amory that he was a lesser human being, even in her eyes. She wanted to tell her father about Amory, but there was Amory’s age — he was thirty-six — and his divorce. She shivered involuntarily.

  Clay saw something was troubling Sharon, something imposed over the grief about her mother. “Are you all right? I mean at school? Is everything all right?”

  “Of course it is. I love it.”

  “Oh? Do you? Wouldn’t you like a vacation? Stay around here. Take the rest of the year off. Look after me.”

  She swallowed back the ache in her throat. “Daddy, I never knew a man who needed less concern than you. You’re the most self-sufficient man I know. The only one.”

  He shook his head. “You know, that was the idea I had about myself? Until — you see, until your mother died. I’ve done a lot of thinking. Ruth was everything I needed, Sharon… . I began to realize it when she was in the hospital … I know it now.”

  “She wanted to take care of you. She treated you just about the way she treated me — wanted you always washed behind your ears, shaved, looking your best, most successful, with everything you wanted. That’s the way she’s treated me all these years.”