Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Margot’s world bursts into color.
The mansion writhes with slowly pulsing bodies; they move en masse to the music—the Byrds, “Eight Miles High”—heads lolled back, necks bare, arms to the ceiling.
They fill every inch of space, draped and knotted around a huge open staircase.
Its wide red carpet climbs up to an enormous chandelier glittering with a thousand tiny lights like a colossal flaming planet above.
People are in costume, doe-eyed women with angel wings strapped to their shoulders, men with devil horns or sly, insidious masks.
She spots the actress from Kubrick’s latest picture, a plucky brunette, and a young starlet in a butter-colored silk dress who was recently disgraced in the papers because her husband had an affair with MGM’s leading man.
Margot can’t push herself three feet through the party without bumping into an actor or singer she recognizes from television.
Long cigarette holders, dirty martinis and slicked-back hair.
It’s intoxicating, really, to be among them.
She has already clocked multiple men eyeing her legs and the curve of her bust. It feels like victory.
She’s just as appealing to them as the models in diamond-encrusted corsets and tight shorts serving microscopic portions of food.
A blond who must be barely out of his teens, his chest shimmering with oil, thrusts a plate of crescent rolls in her direction.
She waves him away and makes for the staircase.
She has managed to ask enough questions to know that Clarke spends his own parties locked away upstairs.
As she climbs the steps she wonders, briefly, if she should be scared.
If her theory is correct—well, if Barbie Cook’s theory is correct—and nothing comes of Elsie’s vigil guy, Clarke may have killed Diane Howard Murray.
He may have strangled her, posed her body, dressed her.
There’s nothing to suggest that he couldn’t be responsible for the other killings, too.
The stairs widen out into an open landing, off which streams a wide corridor with several doors lining it.
She glances briefly back down at the party: a sea of reveling heads, the music segueing into “Wild Thing” by the Troggs.
She doesn’t pause for long before she strikes out across the landing.
If someone confronts her, she’ll tell them she’s looking for the bathroom.
She holds her ear to the first large door.
Nothing, just dead air inside. She turns, continues down the corridor.
Expensive paintings line the walls. She knows they’re expensive because they are ridiculous, and because Clarke could probably acquire the entire contents of the Whitney should he so choose.
Although she notes that he still has that insipid Tretchikoff Chinese Girl print that she’s seen on the wall of every unadventurous suburban living room over the past decade—including Beverley’s.
If Margot could afford it, she’d get a Warhol—not those tacky soup cans, but a Marilyn diptych—pair it with a daring Gae Aulenti piece.
She sucks her teeth. Why is it that those with money never have any taste?
Suddenly there’s a creak from a little farther down the hallway.
Her head snaps around. Thin coils of cigar smoke spill out from a cracked doorway.
Margot’s first impulse is to shrink into the walls, to hide herself, but something inside of her knows this is where Clarke has buried himself away, and she knows she cannot turn back now.
She steps toward the door and slowly pushes it open.
The room is dark, paneled with mahogany and swarming with smoke. There is a large projector screen at the far end, upon which a black-and-white movie is being cast. The film reel gives off a static sound that makes the room feel as if it is suspended in time.
In front of the screen is a plum velvet sofa that claims almost the entire width of the room. On it, with his arms outstretched, the muscles in the back of his neck piled up like a bulldog’s, is Mason Clarke.
She can tell that he’s sensed her presence, but he does not turn to look at her. Instead, he takes a puff of his cigar and calls out into the gloom, his voice entirely monotone, “Chadwick.”
From the shadows, a boulder of a man peels off the wall and makes for Margot.
She almost laughs. She hadn’t seen him there, and it strikes her as exactly the sort of thing you would see in one of Clarke’s own crummy movies—the “bad guy” emerging from the shadows, ready to manhandle a woman. She’d always thought his pictures were full of clichés.
“I’m not an actress.”
The words stop Chadwick in his tracks. He must be used to warding off aspiring starlets.
“Not a model, either. And I think your movies are kind of dull, Mr. Clarke.”
With this, Clarke turns on the couch, his arms still stretched wide, and he scours her up and down, his eyes lingering on her breasts, her hips.
His eyes are small, lost in a meaty face, and the sides of his mouth tilt downward.
His head is bald; he must wear a toupee when he goes out.
His hands are the size of plates, his fingers long and thick.
She imagines them gripping the handle of a hammer, ready to bludgeon.
She swallows but keeps her eyes on him. She knows the worst thing you can do while in the sights of a predator is to show your fear. She tries to make out whether he has any tattoos, LOVE and HATE looming large in her mind.
All of a sudden, Clarke’s shoulders begin to shake, and she wonders if he might have a burst aneurysm. She looks to Chadwick, who is watching Clarke, until a breathy, wheezing sound fills the air, and she realizes it is laughter.
“Dull,” he wheezes. “Is that right, sugarplum? Come. Tell me how you’d do it differently.”
This is how it starts, she supposes, this sort of meeting. He drops his shoulder from the back of the couch and pats the cushion next to him.
She glances at Chadwick again, his face blank, then makes her way around the side of the couch toward the director. His legs are spread wide, thick as a butcher’s hams. He taps the cushion beside him once more, as if she is a dog.
“Chadwick, you can go,” he calls behind him. His eyes return and linger on her bare thighs. Her skin suddenly feels very cold, and she wishes she’d worn the faux fur jacket she’d left in her closet.
“It’s okay. He can stay.”
Chadwick hovers, unsure of what to do, but Clarke waves him off until he closes the door behind him.
Margot feels as if the shadows have suddenly grown around her. She is trapped, the pearlescent acetate of her dress held in the beam of light from the projector.
“Sit.” She can tell it’s an order.
She takes a seat on the armchair next to the sofa.
“No, no no,” he scolds. “Sit.” He taps the sofa cushion more forcefully. She cannot afford to anger him. She crosses to the couch, does as she’s told.
She is aware of his hands, just inches from her neck. She can feel them like heat.
“So…”
“Cindy,” she replies.
“Cindy.” He laughs again. “I like that. It suits you. Let’s go with Cindy. So, if you’re not an actress or a model, what do you do?”
“I work in fashion.”
“Ah yes, I can see that.” He shifts his hips so that he sinks down deeper into the sofa. “So, you think my movies are dull, huh?” He scoffs, a rattling sound, as if his lungs are full of liquid.
On the projector screen, Jimmy Stewart raises a pair of binoculars; Grace Kelly preens prettily in front of a mirror.
Margot lowers her chin. She’s sure she’s seen this on some nature show before. A lesser animal must appear submissive, acknowledge its impotence, so as not to raise hell.
“There are some different stories I would tell,” she says, as sweetly as she can.
“And what would those stories be?” He drops his elbow and lets his hand slide down the couch until his fingers are just millimeters from her thighs.
“There’s someone killing women around Berryview.” She watches his face intently as she says it.
He nods eagerly and waits for her to go on, slipping the wet tongue from his mouth and moving it across his top lip.
“He’s targeting pretty, popular girls,” she continues. “Talented. Athletic.”
He tilts his head from side to side as if this part of the story is perhaps not to his taste.
“The killings are ritualistic and theatrical.”
His eyebrows leap up. “How so?” She senses his fingers twitching beside her legs.
“The women are posed after death.” She scrutinizes him, anticipating when the realization that he has been foiled might land. “They’re dressed in certain clothes, defiled in certain ways, as if the killer is sending a message.”
“Well, I’ve seen films like that, Miss Cindy.” He moves his hand back up on the couch, grazing her leg as he goes. It makes her skin flood with terror. Every inch of her wants to attack, to throttle him, to grab a lamp from the table, but she needs to push him further.
“Diane Howard Murray was strangled and dressed in suspender stockings.”
“Diane Howard Murray…Is she one of MGM’s?”
Margot blinks. He holds her gaze, his expression blank. The sweat of him is turning the air sour.
It dawns on her, a horrible, creeping realization that Mason Clarke is an extremely accomplished actor.
“Girls are all so similar these days. What happened to the Marlenes and the Gretas?” He reaches forward for another cigar from the box on the coffee table, bites the end off, spits it away and then uses it to punctuate the air as he talks.
“Range—that’s what they had. Not all these airhead blondes.
You want a little limoncello? I just got back from doing a picture in Capri. Let’s have a little limoncello.”
“Diane Howard Murray was a model,” she says as Clarke hauls himself up off the couch. She is surprised at just how tall he is, how imposing. He flexes his hands.
“She disappeared two weeks ago, but they found her on Wednesday, dumped in an alleyway in Calabasas. Whoever killed her had dressed her in a designer coat and suspenders.”
“Howard Murray, Howard Murray…Denise, you said?”
“Diane.”
He mumbles as he takes two glasses from a cabinet and pours the drinks. Then he returns to the sofa and inches even closer to her. She can tell this is not the first time he has done this, that he is used to having women on his couch, making them feel compelled to stay.
“Like I said, she was a model. See—this is her.” She bends, takes the photo from her purse and holds it out to him. He leans in. Margot watches his every move, won’t take her eyes off him.
“She wants to be an actress in this picture you’re talking about?” Clarke asks as he reclines again.
He’s trying to wrong-foot her. Stephen used to do that. He was so slick at making it seem as if she was the one who was crazy. Clarke is just as manipulative and even more powerful. He is used to making people think what he wants them to think, used to weaving stories.
“You knew her, Mr. Clarke.”
He frowns, but it’s not convincing.
“She wrote you letters. I’m sure she even sat here, on this couch.”
He stares at her, his expression blank, then tilts his head, reaches a hand forward, trails a finger down the side of her cheek.
She stands suddenly, in recoil, sways on her feet. Her eyes whip around the room. She needs to put some distance between herself and Clarke.
She crosses to the cocktail cabinet, studies the bottles in false interest, buying herself time to think.
“Capri.” She takes the limoncello bottle by the neck, ignoring the tremor in her hands.
“Beautiful place.” She and Stephen honeymooned in Capri.
She can still remember the dry heat of the sun; salty skin, gripping Stephen’s hips with her legs as they moved together in the sea. She blinks it away.
“Busy,” says Clarke. He tips his glass back and destroys the liquid in one. “Beautiful girls.”
“When did you get back?” she asks, trying to sound as offhand as possible.
He pauses, suspicious now. “Thursday.”
She freezes, something horrifying solidifying in her stomach.
“Uh-huh. How long were you out there?”
He looks at her strangely but answers. “Six weeks.”
“You got a plane ticket to account for those dates?”
“What the hell is this?” Clarke’s jaw is flexing angrily.
Shit.
If he’s telling the truth, and he was in Italy until Thursday, was out of the country for the past six weeks, then he cannot be responsible for Diane Howard Murray’s murder. He cannot be responsible for Cheryl’s murder, either, or Emily’s.
She places the bottle back in the cabinet, swallows drily. Clarke raises his weight from the sofa and stalks toward her.
“You have a lot of questions.”
“I should really get going.”
He grabs her wrist, holds her in place.
“Stay awhile,” he says smoothly, as if what he’s asking, expecting, is entirely reasonable.
“We’ve got a bottle to get through.” His grip tightens and she feels the small bones in her wrist click.
“You can tell me more about why you hate my movies.” That almost silent husky laugh again.
She tries to twist away. He pulls her toward him.
“C’mon. I let you up here, didn’t I? Let you ask questions.
Not many people get to see this room. Do a little something for me, baby. ”
With horror she sees that he is reaching for the fly of his pants, that he is slowly unzipping it, holding her gaze like a test.
This is how it feels, she realizes, to know that you are really in trouble, that you are certain to be overpowered. No matter how hard you fight or how gently you try to reason, to coax, it feels like falling. And there’s no way to stop it.
Clarke pulls at his belt buckle, then freezes as a loud knock comes at the door.
Margot wants to sprint over, yank it open, but Clarke still has her by the wrist.
He says nothing, waiting for the visitor to retreat, but the knocking comes again, more urgently.
“Mason!” a voice calls frantically from the other side of the door.
Clarke drops Margot’s wrist, turns angrily. “I’m busy in here,” he growls.
“It’s the fucking crocodile,” the voice strains. “It’s got someone.”