Death Was in the Picture Read Free Page A

such shenanigans, but I wasn’t listening to him much by then.”
    I considered the things I knew about the private life of Laird Wyndham. The papers and the radio went on about him constantly, so I knew a fair amount.
    For starters, he had a contract with his studio that landed him exactly one million dollars per year. And I knew that, if I had five hundred dollars, I’d be able to buy a new car. Five thousand would put me into a fairly swank house; I’d own it, free and clear. For twenty-eight bucks I could buy the coat I’d seen at Bullock’s last week. The prettiest coat that had ever been. But I didn’t have twenty-eight bucks for a coat, not just now. I didn’t even always have a nickel for a cup of coffee. And there were plenty of men out there couldn’t get enough scratch together to buy their babies bread and milk. So a million dollars.Every year? I couldn’t afford all the zeros just to write it out. It made my head swim just thinking about it.
    So, OK: with a million dollars a year, Wyndham made headlines just for doing some shopping. He’d built an unimaginably expensive house in the Hollywood Hills and he owned a ranch in Ventura County, near Oxnard. He was married, too. When he was a very young actor, he’d married his first co-star, some twenty years his senior. As far as I knew, the wife had retired from acting not long after—had closed the door, as the saying went—and now spent her time out on that ranch. No one ever saw very much of her, but they saw Wyndham all right. His name had been linked to every starlet imaginable and I couldn’t begin to count the photos I’d seen of him in the newspaper, at this nightclub or that one, some dazzling young girl on his arm.
    I didn’t know anything about aviation, but I knew he had some sort of plane that had cost a lot of money, something he flew himself and kept in a hangar at an airport out in Glendale. He had a whole stable full of cars, each more expensive than the last. He owned a yacht. Of course. He kept the boat moored out at Long Beach and quite often there were stories in the press about him roughing it at sea on
Woebegone Dream,
named for a picture he’d done a couple of years before. I’d seen a photo in the paper once: Wyndham, beaming, standing on the dock in front of what looked like a small ocean liner. He stood there wearing a captain’s hat turned to a jaunty angle. Behind him ranged the white-clad crew: a half-score of handsome young men in crisp uniforms. The story said the crew had piloted the boat halfway around the world from Italy, where the craft had been built to the specifications of its new owner.
    “So did you take the job?” I asked, half knowing the answer. It was written all over Dex’s concerned mug.
    He nodded. “I did, Kitty. So help me, I did.”
    I nodded approvingly. As I’m always saying, a girl’s gotta eat. “I forgot to tell you: Mustard called when you were in withMr. Dean. He told me to tell you to charge him big. ‘He wanted the best,’ Mustard said. ‘He’ll be expecting to pay for it.’”
    Dex grinned. The smile went all the way to his eyes. “Oh, I soaked him good, Kitty. The pile he gave me, I can barely fold it in half.”
    “So what’s the problem?” Personally, I couldn’t see it. A swell with a fat wallet showed up, offered Dex what sounded like a fairly cushy case and he took the job. What was there to be glum about?
    “Ah, Kitty: I figured you’d see it on your own. It’s the client.”
    “Dean?”
    “No,
his
client. Whoever it is. The ‘group of concerned citizens.’ That kind of thing gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, look at temperance.”
    “Who’s Temperance?” This was getting more and more confusing.
    “Not who, Kitty. What. Temperance was the movement that ended up starting Prohibition. C’mon: the Women’s Temperance League. Didn’t they teach you anything at that fancy school you went to up in Frisco?”
    I shrugged. Of course I knew