“I do divorce work-that’s no problem. But I try not to sell clients out. Bad for business.”
She smiled; she put her hand on my leg. “I could make it worth your while. Financially and… otherwise.”
It wasn’t even Christmas and already here was a second screen goddess who wanted to hop in the sack with me. I must have really been something.
“Listen, if you like me, just say so. But we’re not making a business arrangement-I got a client, already.”
Then she suggested I do to myself what she’d just offered to do for me. She was full of ideas.
So was I. I was pretty sure Thelma and Eastman were indeed having an affair, but it was of the on-again- off-again variety. One night they’d be affectionate, in that sickening Hollywood sweetie-baby way; the next night he would be cool to her; the next she would be cool to him. It was love, I recognized it, but the kind that sooner or later blows up like an overheated engine.
Ten days before Christmas, Thelma was honored by Lupino Lane-the famous British comedian, so famous I’d never the hell heard of him-with a dinner at the Troc. At a table for twelve upstairs, in the swanky cream-and- gold dining room, Thelma was being feted by her show-biz friends, while I sat downstairs in the oak-paneled Cellar Lounge with other people not famous enough to sit upstairs, nursing a rum and Coke at the polished copper bar. I didn’t feel like a polished copper, that was for sure. I was just a chauffeur with a gun, and a beautiful client who didn’t need me.
That much was clear to me: in the two months I’d worked for Thelma, I hadn’t spotted anybody following her except a few fans, and I couldn’t blame them. I think I was just a little bit in love with the ice-cream blonde myself. We’d only had that one slightly inebriated night togeth#8212;and neither of us had mentioned it since, or even referred to it. Maybe we were both embarrassed; I didn’t figure either of us were exactly the type to be ashamed.
Anyway, she was a client, and she slept around, and neither of those things appealed to me in a girl-though everything else about her, including her money, did.
About half an hour into the evening, I heard a scream upstairs. A woman’s scream, a scream that might have belonged to Thelma.
I took the stairs four at a time and had my gun in my hand when I entered the fancy dining room. Normally when I enter fancy dining rooms with a gun in my hand, all eyes are on me. Not this time.
Thelma was clawing at her ex-husband, who was laughing at her. She was being held back by Patsy Kelly, the dark-haired rubber-faced comedienne who was Thelma’s partner in the two-reelers. DeCiro, in a white tux, had a starlet on his arm, a blonde about twenty with a neckline down to her shoes. The starlet looked frightened, but DeCiro was having a big laugh.
I put my gun away and took over for Patsy Kelly.
“Miss Todd,” I said, gently, whispering into her ear, holding onto her two arms from behind, “don’t do this.”
She went limp for a moment, then straightened and said, with stiff dignity, “I’m all right, Nathan.”
It was the only time she ever called me that.
I let go of her.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. I was asking both Thelma Todd and her ex-husband.
“He embarrassed me,” she said, without any further explanation.
And without any further anything, I said to DeCiro, “Go.”
DeCiro twitched a smile. “I was invited.”
“I’m uninviting you. Go.”
His face tightened and he thought about saying or doing something. But my eyes were on him like magnets on metal and instead he gathered his date and her decolletage and took a powder.
“Are you ready to go home?” I asked Thelma.
“No,” she said, with a shy smile, and she squeezed my arm, and went back to the table of twelve where her party of Hollywood types awaited. She was the guest of honor, after all.
Two hours, and two drinks later, I was escorting her home. She sat in the back of the candy-apple red Packard in her mink coat and sheer mauve-and-silver evening gown and diamond necklace and told me what had happened, the wind whipping her ice-blonde hair.
“Nicky got himself invited,” she said, almost shouting over the wind. “Without my knowledge. Asked the host to reserve a seat next to me at the table. Then he wandered in late, with a date, that little
“t’s what you pay me for.”
She sat in silence for a while; only the wind spoke. It was a cold Saturday night, as cold as a chilled martini. I had asked her if she wanted the top up on the convertible, but she said no. She began to look behind us as we moved slowly down Sunset.
“Heller,” she said, “someone’s following us.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Somebody’s following us, I tell you!”
“I’m keeping an eye on the rear-view mirror. We’re fine.”
She leaned forward and clutched my shoulder. “Get moving! Do you want me to be kidnapped, or killed? It could be Luciano’s gangsters, for God’s sake!”
She was the boss. I hit the pedal. At speeds up to seventy miles per, we sailed west around the curves of Sunset; there was a service station at the junction of the boulevard and the coast highway, and I pulled in.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
I turned and looked into the frightened blue eyes. “I’m going to get some gas, and keep watch. And see if anybody comes up on us, or suspicious goes by. Don’t you worry. I’m armed.”
I looked close at every car that passed by the station. I saw no one and nothing suspicious. Then I paid the attendant and we headed north on the coast highway. Going nice and slow.
“I ought to fire you,” she said, pouting back there.
“This is my last night, Miss Todd,” I said. “I’m getting homesick for Chicago. They got a better breed of dishonest people back there. Anyway, I like to work for my money. I feel I’m taking yours.”
She leaned forward, clutched my shoulder again. “No, no, I tell you, I’m frightened.”
“Why?”
“I…I just feel I still need you around. You give me a sense of security.”
“Have you had any more threatening notes?”
“No.” Her voice sounded very small, now.
“If you do, call me, or the cops. Or both.”
It was two a.m. when I slid the big car in in front of the sprawling Sidewalk Cafe. I was shivering with cold; a sea breeze was blowing, Old Man Winter taking his revenge on California. I turned and looked at her again. I smiled.
“I’ll walk you to the door, Miss Todd.”
She smiled at me, too, but this time the smile didn’t light up her face, or the world, or me. This time the smile was as sad as her eyes. Sadder.
“That won’t be necessary, Heller.”
I was looking for an invitation, either in her eyes or her voice; I couldn’t quite find one. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Do me one favor. Work for me next week. Be my chauffeur one more week, while I decide whether or not to replace you with another bodyard, or…what.”
“Okay.”
“Go home, Heller. See you Monday.”
“See you Monday,” I said, and I watched her go in the front door of the Cafe. Then I drove the Packard up to the garage above, on the Palisades, and got in my dusty inelegant 1925 Marmon and headed back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. I had a hunch Thelma Todd, for all her apprehensions, would sleep sounder than I
