McNally's Folly Read Free

be alive and a libel suit I don’t need. Look what happened to O. Wilde.)
    “Not as bawdy as today’s porn videos, but bad enough,” Holmes went on. Had he seen the film or was he quoting his wife’s rationalization of her early cinematic offering? “It was never widely distributed because in them days you could go to jail just for looking at a smoker.”
    Not to mention that in them days you could go to jail twice as long for starring in one. And, if his grammatical faux pas was any indication of his roots, Richard Holmes traded up when he went into pork bellies.
    “The studio thought they had bought up the few that existed,” Holmes told us, “but they missed one.”
    “Your wife is being blackmailed, sir,” I stated.
    The jowls shook in agreement. “But not in the way you’re thinking, Archy. The guy has never asked her for a dime. But every year, on the anniversary of the day the film was made, he sends her a reminder, telling her he owns a print and might, or might not, go public with it. I guess you could call it emotional blackmail. And it’s been going on for over half a century.”
    “And after all this time your wife is still perturbed by the possibility that he may go public?”
    “If perturbed is a nice way of saying she’s bonkers over the possibility, then she’s pretty effing perturbed, if you’ll excuse the English. Actresses are very vain people, Archy, and DeeDee is a classic example of the breed. Hanging on to the Golden Girl image is more important to her than life itself.”
    “Do the letters contain a return address?”
    “No way. They come from all over the country through some kind of mail-drop service.”
    “And Mrs. Holmes wants Ouspenskaya to find this miscreant?”
    “That’s right. And if he’s dead, she wants to know what he did with that little tin can in his possession. Ouspenskaya is not the first psychic DeeDee has been to with this but he’s the first to get her so bamboozled. You see, she didn’t have to tell him what she was looking for. He knew.”
    A good guess, I thought, or the guy did a bit of research. With a lady boasting a public record as long as Desdemona Darling’s, he probably picked up enough info to make her believe he had spent the last fifty years in her boudoir.
    “He charges five hundred bucks a session, Archy, and my wife has him on our weekly payroll.”
    “Did it ever occur to you, or Mrs. Holmes, that the threat is a paper tiger? I mean, how do you know he actually owns a print of the infamous one-reeler?”
    “Because of how the letters are signed,” Holmes said.
    “And how are they signed, sir?”
    “Kirk.”
    “And does Mrs. Holmes know who Kirk is, sir?”
    “Sure. He’s the cameraman who photographed the one-reeler.”

TWO
    I T WAS TIME TO collect on the lunch I had so generously advanced Connie a few days earlier. If Serge Ouspenskaya was the current rage of Palm Beach society, Connie could fill me in on all the vital statistics. Connie labors as social secretary to Lady Cynthia Horowitz, Palm Beach’s hostess with the mostest. In that capacity, Connie was a one-woman FBI, CIA and yenta who kept an ear to our sandy ground and an eye on those who trod it. She was as vital to my line of work as Tonto was to the Lone Ranger’s.
    Not being the cad I pretend to be, or would like to be, I am not smitten with Connie for purely commercial reasons. She is the one steady love of my life and we have been dating for lo these many years, a relationship I prefer to marriage. However, whenever Connie plays bridesmaid to one of her numerous cousins, she never misses the opportunity to lament, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” Therefore, when I was godfather to my sister’s boy, Darcy, I loudly proclaimed, “Always a godfather, never a god.” Connie, alas, did not appreciate the witticism.
    I called Connie and, happily, she was free for lunch. I told her I would pick her up at high noon and rode down to petty cash to collect on