Dorothy could tell the poor kid needed a place to stay… and Beth looked so pretty, and she had the air of somebody who’d been successful, but was down on her luck.”
Fowley nodded. “How did you react when your daughter brought home a stranger?”
“I didn’t think much of it. What with the housing shortage, so many girls losing their jobs to returning servicemen, prices going sky high… and us lucky enough to live in a rent-controlled house… why shouldn’t we help a nice girl get back on her feet?”
“And that’s how one night turned into a month.”
“More or less. The story was Beth had missed her ride and was kind of stranded, and would just ‘camp out’ on our couch for the night. That first night I sat and drank coffee with the girl and made her a sandwich and gathered quickly that she was hungry and homeless and broke. She looked so pale, and she coughed, like she had some kind of congestion. Like I said, I guess I’m a soft touch myself, and when it turned out she’d lost her husband-Major Matt something, died in a plane crash, in India-I guess I kind of identified with her.”
“You invited her to stay for a few days.”
“Yes… my son, Cory-he’s thirteen. I think had a kind of a crush on Beth-she sweet-talked him, after school, to take the bus down to the Greyhound station and pick up her suitcases. Cory said her bags were so heavy they mighta been filled with rocks… but it was clothing, expensive clothing too, silk, satin, all those exotic black outfits she wore.”
I said, “I guess once you saw her moving in her suitcases, you figured your overnight guest was planning to stay awhile.”
Mrs. French nodded, smirking just a little, drawing on the Camel; she exhaled as she said, “Beth assured me she wouldn’t stay longer than a day or so, just until some money she had wired somebody for had arrived. And she said she’d pay us for our inconvenience… Of course I said, ‘Don’t be silly-you’re our guest, our welcome guest.’ Welcome was right.”
When Mrs. French came home for lunch on the second day of Beth’s stay, she found the girl still asleep on the couch, with the living room turned into a virtual showroom of fancy clothing and underthings-including black lacy lingerie and black silk stockings.
“There was a strong, sickly sweet scent everywhere, from her perfume-as if she covered not just herself but her clothing in the stuff. She woke, when I came in, and she apologized for sleeping so late-she’d been out till two in the morning, the night before, she explained, a date with her prospective employer… supposedly she had applied for a job at Western Airlines.”
The late nights, followed by sleeping till noon, became a pattern for their houseguest. Every night, it seemed, Beth was out with a different man-“For a poor lost soul, this girl had gathered quite the circle of admirers!”-and the following morning, she would sleep till noon, then lounge through the afternoon in her black satiny pajamas and/or a black Chinese flower-and-dragon-bedecked robe, sipping coffee, raiding the icebox, writing letters, reading magazines, fiddling with her clothes, laying them out and looking at them, occasionally ironing them, putting on her makeup, painting her toenails red.
“I asked her to dress a little less casually when my son was in the house,” Mrs. French said. “Cory’s at that impressionable age-a beautiful half-naked girl wandering about the house, flaunting herself in front of a teenage boy, well… it’s hardly ideal.”
Unless you were a teenage boy. Hardly.
“She turned my living room into her bedroom,” Mrs. French said, shaking her head. “Then Beth tried to sweet-talk Cory into giving her his bedroom, suggesting he sleep on the couch, which he was more than willing to do… but I forbade that-things would’ve never got back to normal! That girl was treating my son like a damn coolie- pardon my French-sending him out after scented stationery and movie magazines and, excuse me, sanitary napkins. My son!”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “why didn’t you just throw her out on her pretty behind?”
She sighed more smoke. “Beth and Dorothy had become good friends, and Cory just loved her; she did these imitations of stars on the radio that made him laugh…”
Plus she walked around half-naked.
“… and me, well, the two of us would sit at the kitchen table and talk about our husbands who’d died in the war. She still loved her pilot, she said, so much so that it had kept her from falling in love again, no matter how many men she dated. She said if ‘fate had been kinder’ she might be living with her major in a little house somewhere, right now… a nice little house like ours.”
“She never did get a job?” Fowley asked.
“No, not at the Naval hospital or that airline office or anywhere else-she took a certain number of interviews, or at least pretended to. But that’s all. I started to get fed up, toward Christmas-I mean, here I am, tiptoeing around my own house, getting ready for work, not wanting to wake this lazy girl, who should have been up and dressed and out looking for her own job. I mean, particularly when you consider how badly she said she needed money.”
“Considering the low overhead,” Fowley said, “what did she need money for?”
“She didn’t say-just that she needed to save up for ‘something special.’ ”
Like an abortion. Going rate, in Hollywood-for a first-rate rabbit-puller, anyway-was five hundred bucks.
“All I know is,” Mrs. French was saying, “Beth never said no to somebody else paying her way, and while she was with us, she kept wiring people, boy friends and family, for money. She got a one hundred dollar money order from one of her servicemen boy friends, right before Christmas, and another twenty-five dollars from some actress friend in Hollywood.”
Fowley asked, “And she didn’t spend any of this money, that you know of?”
“No-she hoarded her cash. Well, she did give us small presents at Christmas-trinkets to ‘repay our kindness.’ Dorothy thought Beth might have been saving for some special wardrobe for her screen test.”
“What screen test is that?”
“Oh, probably no screen test. She was full of big Hollywood talk, how when the strikes were over she’d go back and move from ‘bit parts’ into bigger, better movie roles. She claimed a Hollywood celebrity had promised to help her-some famous director.”
Fowley sat forward, perked by this concept. “She didn’t mention anybody by name?”
“No-well, maybe. She referred to this celebrity as ‘George,’ or ‘Georgie,’ a few times.”
“Again,” I said, “why didn’t you just ask her to leave?”
Her eyebrows hiked. “You can’t tell someone to go away, once you’ve asked them to stay! Finally I gave her the address of a temporary employment agency, and she said she’d call them, but I told her it would be better to apply in person… Eventually she got dressed and went out, but she looked more like she was going out on a date, in gloves and a hat with a veil. That was one of the few times she went anywhere by herself, and not with Dorothy, or one of those men of hers. It was almost like she was afraid to leave the house, alone.”
“Afraid?” I asked “Really afraid?”
Mrs. French nodded. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now… now that she’s suffered this awful fate… it does seem to me Beth was… skittish. Whenever anyone came to the door, she’d act… nervous.”
“Nervous?”
“Frightened-she didn’t say anything very specific, for as much as we talked about her late husband and her Hollywood aspirations and all, Beth could be… secretive. Always polite, but private. I did ask her what she was frightened of, and she said there were a lot of crazy, dangerous people in ‘Tinsel Town.’ As an example, she told me about a woman chasing her down Hollywood Boulevard, threatening her life.”
Fowley asked, “When was this?”
“Right before she came down to San Diego, I gathered. Oh yes, and she made reference to having an ‘Italian boy friend,’ who she seemed… if not afraid of, wary of. I even wondered if maybe she hadn’t come down to San Diego to get away from him, even to hide out.”
I asked, “Did she mention this Italian boy friend’s name?”
“No. But there was this one unusual incident-right before she left.” She blew out some smoke, gathering her thoughts. “A tan coupe pulled up outside our house, and two men and a woman came up to the door, and knocked, and waited. Beth peeked out the front window at them, careful not to be seen. They knocked again, and-waking me, I’d been napping-I stumbled out of my bedroom and over to answer the door, but Beth stopped me, wild eyed, and shaking her head, no, no, no.”
