Chapter 13 The Lie Is Smooth #2
He pushes open the door and, in a second, sees June.
As if punched in the stomach, he doubles over, whispering Italian—prayers or curses, Frankie’s not sure.
When he looks up again, there are tears in his eyes, and she can see the effort it takes to not look back at June.
Because he loved her, Frankie knows. He protected her.
He took care of her, above all else, and now he’s failed.
As fast as she can, she starts to explain that Jack had a lot to drink and ended up in bungalow two, that he called her when he found June this morning, but she stops talking when Nico turns toward her. Slow and focused. Calm. “Jack was here?”
She motions to the bedroom.
“He’s still here?”
When they push open the bedroom door, Jack is on his back, feet hanging over the end of the bed. His eyes are open, staring at the ceiling.
Then they are in the kitchen, and Jack is talking.
In each pause, Frankie gathers the courage to come clean, to hand Nico every card—including the truth of her and Jack—and let him figure out a play.
But she’s too slow. Muddled. Jack fills the silences, telling the story of what happened as if she were never a part of it, then saying it must have been close to three a.m. when he jolted awake.
Frankie knows he’s right to omit her role; it would make everything ten times worse if Nico knew she was part of why Jack was here to begin with.
“And you got a ride from who at the pool hall?” Nico asks.
“Some guy. Barely talked to him, but he heard I needed a ride and volunteered, till I said Pasadena. Then he was set to leave me—so I told him to take me here. It was closer.”
The lie is smooth. Though it shouldn’t surprise her, since he’s essentially trained in lying, it still throws her how convincing he is.
A sound. A bird. It’s loud, a crow that must be on the branch outside the window, but Jack’s reaction is disproportionate. He flinches as if someone slammed a door beside him.
Nico eyes him. “We just lost one star. If we’re not careful, we’ll lose another. Jack, tell me about the pool hall and the guy.”
Jack looks around the room as if hunting for any further potential noise. “It was a dive. No one in there knew who I was. Or cared. I wouldn’t know how to find that guy if I tried.”
Nico nods. “We need to stick with Malibu, that you went straight there. We’ve got everything in place; pretty much already got alibis. Thank God. O’Shea, the champagne delivery, everything works in our favor right now, and if someone from the pool hall comes out of the woodwork, I’ll deal with it.”
Frankie glances at Jack, who blinks heavily, as if he has to clear his vision of something he doesn’t want to see. “They were going to elope,” she says. “That’s why June wasn’t with him. Last minute, she came here so they didn’t see each other. Whatever that tradition is.”
“That’s good. Jack, you hear me? You were sick of the hysteria around the wedding, and you decided to elope.”
Barely, Jack nods. Then he leans forward. “Who was the father?”
“What?”
“Motive.”
Nico shakes his head. “She didn’t tell me. She said she wanted part of her life to be just hers. I didn’t press.”
“The man finds out she’s marrying me, he’s furious, he kills her.”
“She never said anything that made me think he was jealous or angry, or anything. But I guess nothing’s off the table.”
Frankie touches a pink rose petal. “Why would you kill someone if you want to be with them? Unless that love is unreciprocated. Unless you live in a fantasy world.”
“Tank Adams,” Nico says. Frankie nods.
Could Tank have done it? Years back, there was a scandal at the warehouse where he worked, and rumors made it to the papers that he stole money.
There was more, Nico said. Plenty of reasons to keep him away, and plenty of damage he could do to her reputation.
Frankie sees Tank following June, watching her from across streets.
Once, he left a letter for her on a chair in the makeup department, and no one knew how he got in.
When June read it, her face seemed to collapse with sadness like someone finally glimpsing an unfortunate truth.
Nico stands, heading to the phone. “Tank being jealous and shooting her because he couldn’t have her—that I see. I need to call my guys and then Mickey.” Mickey Mulroney. The chief of police, who also works for the studio.
In another world, the police would’ve already been here. But in this world, there is what they can do to save June—which is nothing—and what they can do to save Jack—which is everything.
Then Jack says something quietly, and Nico looks as though he’s going to be sick. In a rush, he’s hung up the phone before anyone answered, and stormed into the living room.
“What’d you say to him?” Frankie asks.
“I said the back door wasn’t completely closed. It’s hard to lock. It happened after the last rain.”
In the other room, Nico’s swearing.
“It sticks,” Jack continues. “Maybe he didn’t know. You think that’s how the person who shot her got in? It’s how I got in.”
From the other room, Nico’s voice goes loud. “The necklace. Where’s the necklace?”
Just like that, what happened crystallizes. And though they know they won’t find it, Frankie searches the house while Nico makes calls—the first to a few associates he ropes in only for the big jobs, and second to Mickey.
What they learn is that June must have been staying here for a while.
In the closet, there are shirts and skirts and a few dresses, as well as high heels lined up along the floorboards.
In the bathroom, there’s Noxzema, pill bottles, even perfume.
Jean Patou’s Joy Parfum Luxe. Ten thousand jasmine flowers and twenty-eight dozen roses, just to make one ounce.
Claimed to be the costliest perfume in the world.
They just gave it to me, Frankie, June had said of the bottle, whose label even had June’s name on it.
It makes me delirious, it’s so beautiful.
Frankie picks up the flacon and twists the crystal stopper, bringing it to her nose: flowery green, a heart of rose, and a hint of the musk to come.
Closing her eyes, she feels as if June stands beside her.
Off the phone, Nico leans forward in the wooden chair at the desk, elbows on his knees.
June’s eyes are still open. Once, not long enough ago, Frankie watched a stranger close her mother’s eyes for the last time.
Now, she goes to June and calls to Nico.
When he understands what she’s doing, he nods.
Against the wall, Jack watches, his face pale. “No one but us knew she was staying here.”
Nico corrects him. “No one at the outset. Then we had a premiere with hundreds of people who saw her in that thing, and how hard would it be to follow the limo and catch her ducking into a different car? This day and age, that necklace would’ve tempted anyone.”
June’s gun. Her beaded handbag is on the table, but when Frankie goes to it, she sees the gun’s not there. “I didn’t see her gun anywhere when I looked for the necklace.”
Nico eyes June’s small handbag. “Doubt she’d take it to a premiere.”
“No, she did.”
Jack. They turn to him.
He continues. “She had it in there. On the way to the premiere, she got a mint from her bag and I saw it. Said she felt better with it.”
“Those people,” Nico says. “Goddamn those people who scared her.”
“You think it was them?” Frankie asks.
But Nico’s shaking his head. “No. No, they didn’t know who she was. But they were the reason she started carrying that thing. And my guess is that the bullet that killed her is a .41, like her gun. My guess is her gun was turned against her.”
“Maybe he had a knife,” Frankie says. “Maybe she thought she could defend herself.”
“And if he used her gun, he wouldn’t leave it behind, because his prints were on it. So I see two possibilities. One, she went for it to defend herself, and he got it. Or two, he came in, knew where it was, and he went for it.”
He knew where it was.
Jack narrows his eyes, staring at the floor. Because he just admitted he knew the gun was in her purse.
Light from the kitchen slips into the room, time a slow unravel.
Now and then, understanding hits her. June is dead.
This fact is there and then gone, a claw of grief that retracts as fast as it emerges.
Because June is still there, in the stack of magazines in the corner, her name on a script on the desk, her voice in rooms across the country.
She’s larger than life, and so that she’s dead makes no sense.
Suddenly Frankie’s own words return to her, words she spoke at the premiere when she and Nico were talking about Harry Winston.
“Without a security guard. I said that. At the premiere. About June wearing the necklace. Remember? Nico, what—”
But he cuts her off. “No one heard that.”
“There were people right next to us—”
“And you just happened to say it within earshot of the one person who would do something like this?”
“This day and age, the necklace would’ve tempted anyone. You just said that.”
“Frankie.” He’s pleading. “Don’t go down that road. Either it was Tank or a robbery because someone saw her there, with their own eyes, and followed her. Either way, it has nothing to do with you.”
A knock on the door. Nico answers, assuming it’s his men. In a beat, the neighbor woman from up the hill has her hands on her mouth, her eyes wide.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. I knew I heard—”
Nico’s got her arm, saying, “Shh, shh, shh,” as he ushers her inside, passing Jack—whom the woman cranes her neck to look at—and straight into the kitchen.
It’s the neighbor with the dog. Mid-fifties, a face that’s on a slow slide away from beautiful, a blue paisley scarf wrapped on her hair and rollers bulging underneath.
Uneven red lipstick as if she heard Nico’s car and raced down here but first needed to look presentable.
Darlene Cleary, she says to Frankie. I live up the hill.
Her voice is crumbly, breaking apart. The complainer, Nico’s called her. A staunch prohibitionist.
Unprompted, Darlene unleashes everything she knows.
A bang around three a.m. She got up and out of bed and saw the dark shape of a man walking the path from the back of June’s bungalow toward Arlington.
Though she waited to hear the sound of a car starting or sirens, there was nothing.
“A bang, and then silence. I figured someone got drunk and shot off a gun. That happens here, believe you me.”
The words slide into one. Believeyoume. With barely a pause, she continues.
“And they want to bring it back, don’t they?
So the fools don’t even need to sneak in booze, they just traipse it right in?
” She turns to Frankie. “One man, a couple years back, he aimed at my weather vane. Missed and got the corner of my house—even worse! No point in calling the cops, Mr. Marconi told me. I have his personal number.”
“I apologize, Darlene,” Nico says. “You’ve been one of the best neighbors we’ve had. Truly.”
Momentarily, Darlene looks flattered, but then she raises her hand to her mouth and bites her thumbnail before repeating the entire story again, her eyes jittery.
Another one of life’s ironies: The most important times to be present and make sound choices are when you’re reeling and barely holding on.
Darlene lowers her hand. There’s lipstick on her thumb. “I figured when I didn’t hear a car start up or sirens or anything that someone’s good time just got out of hand. I figured they were staying in that back house.”
That back house. Nico glances at Frankie, and with his look, the implication hits home: A man took the path from the back of June’s bungalow toward Arlington Way, which also happens to lead past Jack’s door.
If a car didn’t start up, it means they either didn’t leave by car or didn’t leave at all.
A sour feeling begins to gnaw at her stomach.
“But you don’t always hear the cars, do you?” Frankie asks.
The woman gives a laugh. “No one drives on Arlington. Not if they’re smart. You can bet if there’s a car there, I hear it. Even people who use that tunnel—”
“The tunnel,” Frankie says. The entrance is a barely concealed faux-brick wall behind the second bungalow.
“No,” Nico says. “The tunnel also spits out on Arlington Way. Just up from Darlene’s house. She’d have heard a car there too. And she’s right. No one in their right mind would have a getaway car there, not unless they want to take an hour to turn around.”
The woman’s eyes well again. “June Finney never caused problems. You know that? I can’t see much from up there, but I can see the part of the path at her back door, where that fountain is?
One morning, I looked down and saw her setting camellia blooms on the water.
I suppose because it was beautiful.” A teardrop hangs on her chin.
“I saw all her movies. She’s from Iowa, like me. ”
Nico’s nodding. “Everyone loved her, Darlene. So, I’m asking, as a favor to June, let us figure out the best way to tell people about this.”
Using the tail end of her headscarf to wipe her cheek, Darlene nods solemnly. Standing, she glances toward the living room. “That was her fiancé, wasn’t it?”
Nico takes a moment, either debating about coming clean or perhaps trying to impart the impression that this, too, is monumental information that he’s trusting her with. Finally, he nods.
“You’ll tell him I’m sorry?” Darlene asks.
Frankie leads the way to the back door, away from June’s body. Outside, it’s started to drizzle, haphazard drops that seem to match the buzzing in her mind.