that she couldn’t have kids…” He spread his hands.
I nodded.
“We raised her careful. She went to school with the nuns. Goes to school now in Geneva. She plays the piano, speaks French perfect. Maybe you saw her when you came up the drive. Riding a white horse. Can ride like a jockey.”
I nodded.
“I bought her that white horse for her sixteenth birthday. From school she writes it letters. Her mother reads them to the horse.”
Del Rio looked at me hard for a moment. I made no comment.
“She’s home for Christmas,” he said.
I nodded. To my left Chollo got up and squatted before the fireplace on the left wall. He fiddled with it for a moment while del Rio and I watched. Then a gas flame appeared. Chollo put a couple of dry, barkless logs on top of the grate and stood and went back to his chair. The blue gas flame began to move among the logs, turning orange where it hit them and caught.
“So I told Jill,” del Rio said, “I take care of the kid. The kid is mine. She is no longer yours. She belongs to me and to my wife. My wife is her mother now. I said if she ever caused me trouble, if she ever hurt my daughter or my wife, if she ever spoke of this… ”
Del Rio held his right hand out, with the first two fingers apart like the blades of a scissors, and closed them. Nobody said anything. The flame had caught the bone-dry wood and made bright heatless orange movements in the Mexican tile fireplace. A California fire. All light, no heat.
“Jill never really had any luck,” del Rio said. He was sitting back in his chair now, his hands locked behind his head, staring into the fire. “Sounds funny to say about her. She’s a big star, big TV star. But she’s never really caught a break… except me.”
Del Rio paused again. I could hear him breathing softly through his nose.
“I got her started. She came from nowhere. Mother’s a drunk. Old man left when she was a kid. Had a baby, had to give it up. She never knew what she was, then she got to be a star and everybody started treating her like she was a princess, you know… the fucking emperor’s daughter… so she thought she was.”
“She knows she isn’t,” I said.
Del Rio shifted his eyes to me thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe she does.”
“Makes it worse,” I said.
Del Rio nodded slowly with the right side of his face lit by the fire and the left side in darkness. “Si,” he said.
Chapter 26
JILL’S agent worked for an agency that occupied the top‘ half of a new skyscraper in Century City where, if you looked out the windows, you could see Twentieth Century Fox. While I sat in the waiting room two would-be starlets with flat blue eyes and a lot of blond hair chanted at the switchboard. “Robert Brown Agency, good morning.”
Each of them said it maybe a hundred times while I waited. Each time they said it exactly as they had said it previously. Then they would listen and touch a button and the call would be processed. There was a mindless fascination to it, like watching water boil. The waiting room was done in beige marble and pale green carpeting. On the wall above the blond bentwood chair I sat in was a picture of the founder of the agency. Robert Brown had a wide face and red cheeks, and the smile of a child molester. Under the portrait was a brass plaque bearing his name and the single word INTEGRITY.
On some of the other chairs sat people trying to look in control while they waited hopefully. There was a guy in a silk tweed jacket and starched jeans carrying a manila envelope that reeked of manuscript. He had no socks on, and his ankles were tan above the low cut of his woven leather loafers. Under the silk tweed he wore a tuxedo shirt, open at the throat. Agents, mostly men, mostly young, strolled through the waiting room to and from the inner spaces, carrying themselves as insiders always did in the presence of outsiders.
A good-looking young woman with more hair than the switchboard ladies came out from one of the doors behind the switchboard. She wore a cobalt silk dress spattered with red flowers. Her hips rolled as she walked.
“Mr. Spenser?” she said. Her eyes sparkled, her smile gleamed.
I nodded.
“Hi, I’m Jasmine, Ken’s assistant. Ken’s on the phone long distance to London and he asked me to see if you wanted coffee or anything.”
“Hot diggity,” I said.
Jasmine’s smile gleamed even more brightly. “Excuse me?” she said.
“London is exciting,” I said. “I mean, how would I feel if you came out and said I’d have to wait because Ken was on the phone to Culver City?”
Jasmine seemed a bit confused, but it in no way interfered with the luminosity of her smile.
“Exactly,” she said. “Did you say you wanted coffee?”
“No, thank you, Jasmine.”
“Tea, juice, Perrier?”
“No, thank you, Jasmine.”
“Well, you be comfortable, and Ken will be with you as soon as he can get off the phone.”
