Belinda Page 11

  The fact was, none of this explained anything much about Belinda. It only added to my questions.

  I LOCKED up the house for the night, put out the lights, went into the bathroom, and felt my face. Real scratchy beard, as always this time of night. I decided to shave.

  When she woke up in the morning in my arms, I didn’t want any face scratching her babycheeks.

  As I lay there in the dark, I kept thinking: Who is looking for her? Who is crying over her? Dear God, if she were my little girl, I’d move heaven and earth to find her.

  But then, she is my little girl. And do I want them, whoever they are, to find her?

  No, you can’t have her back. Not now.

  AT nine A.M., I was sitting in my office and she was still asleep. I picked up the phone on the desk and called my lawyer, Dan Franklin. He wouldn’t be back from court till eleven, his secretary said, but, yes, he could probably see me then. Come on over.

  Now, my lawyer and I went to school together. He’s probably as good a friend as I have, and the one person in the world I trust more than any other.

  Agents, no matter much they love you and how hard they work for you, are really go-betweens. And they often know the movie people and the publishers better than they know their authors. Often they like the movie people and the publishers better. They have more in common with them.

  But my lawyer worked only for me. When he went over a contract or an offer for rights, he was on my side completely. And he was one of the few really good entertainment lawyers who did not make his office in New York or Los Angeles.

  Not only did I trust my lawyer, I also liked him, personally. I trusted his judgment, I considered him a nice guy.

  And I knew now that I’d avoided him at Andy Blatky’s exhibit the other day because I hadn’t wanted to explain Belinda.

  I made the appointment to see him at eleven. Then I showered, shaved again, put two good head shots of Belinda in a manila envelope, and put that in my briefcase.

  I had hoped to have more for a start. But the more could come later.

  BELINDA was eating potato chips and drinking a Coke when I came down. She’d gone across the street to the corner store for them while I was in the shower.

  “That’s breakfast?” I asked.

  “Yeah, cuts through the smoke,” she said. She gestured to the lighted cigarette.

  “That’s trash,” I said.

  “Cereal’s got just as much salt, do you know that?”

  “What about eggs and toast and milk?” I said. I went to work fixing enough for both of us.

  Yeah, gee, thanks for the eggs, but she was full of potato chips. She opened another can of Coke and sat down to tell me how wonderful it was being here.

  “I slept last night, I mean, really slept without thinking somebody was going to climb in the window or start playing the drums in the hallway.” I got an idea.

  “Have to see my lawyer downtown,” I said. “Some stuff about one of my mother’s books, a movie deal.”

  “Sounds exciting. I loved your mother’s books, you know.”

  “You’re kidding, you never read them.”

  “Not so! Read every one, absolutely loved Crimson Mardi Gras.” We stared at each other for a moment. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “just business on my mind. I’m taking the van downtown. Do you really know how to drive a car?”

  “Of course, how do you think I got the fake license? I mean, the name’s fake, but I was driving on ... driving in Europe when I was eleven.”

  “You want the keys to the MG, then?”

  “Jeremy, you don’t mean it.” I tossed them to her. Bait taken.

  She was down not ten minutes later, dressed in a new pair of snow white wash pants and a white pullover. It was the first time I’d seen her in pants since she wore the cutoff shorts around the house, and I was unprepared for my reaction. I didn’t want her to venture out the front door like that.

  “You know what that makes me want to do?” I said giving her the eye.

  “What?” She missed the point. “How do I look?” She was brushing her hair in front of the hall mirror. “Rapeable.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You going to wear a coat?”

  “It’s eighty degrees out there, you must be kidding. First time this city has warmed up to a civilized temperature since I got here.”

  “It won’t last. Take a coat.”

  She threw her arms around my neck, kissed me. Soft hot crush of arms and cheeks. Babymouth succulent, sweet. “Don’t need a coat.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Tanning studio for fifteen minutes under the hot lights,” she said tapping her cheek with one finger. “It’s the only way to stay brown in this town. Then riding, Golden Gate Park stables. I called from upstairs. I’ve wanted to do it since I got here.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t seem appropriate, you know, the way I was living.” She was digging in her purse for a cigarette. “You know, I was on the street. All that. Didn’t seem to mix with horses.”

  “But it mixed with the tanning studio.”

  “Sure.” She laughed. Her hair was beautifully full from the brushing. No paint, just the cigarette on her lip.

  “And now you can go riding again.”

  “Yes!” She laughed in the most open, delighted fashion. “You are truly beautiful,” I said. “But the pants are too tight.”

  “Oh, no, they feel fine,” she said. Snap of her lighter.

  I took out several ten-dollar bills and gave her that with the keys to the car and the house.

  “You don’t have to, really—” she said. “I have money—”

  “Look, don’t bother saying that ever again,” I said. “It’s like when I ask you questions about your parents. Don’t mention money. I hate it.”

  Another sweet soft tight hug and she was off, just dashed out the front door, in fact, like an American teenager.

  And probably with the key to the suitcase in her purse. But—

  I WAITED till I heard the car roaring up the street before I went upstairs and opened her closet.

  The key was in the damn suitcase and the suitcase was open.

  I took a deep breath, then knelt down, laid back the lid, and started going through it.

  Fake Linda Merit passport! My God, she was thorough. Two New York Public Library books, one a Vonnegut novel, the other a Stephen King. Typical enough, I figured. Then there was my signed copy of Bettina’s House and a picture of me over a notice of the booksellers autograph party cut out of the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Lingerie—even that looked second-hand—old-fashioned midnight blue taffeta slips, lace brassieres with wire, which I don’t think girls wear much anymore. Cotton panties, beautifully plain. A brown paper sack and in it programs from several recent Broadway musicals. Cats, A Chorus Line, Ollie Boon’s Dolly Rose, other things. The Ollie Boon program had been autographed, but no personal note above the signature. Absolutely nothing here that was personal.

  I mean, not a clue to who she was. And for some reason this made me feel all the more guilty for what I was doing.

  Had she deliberately obliterated her past? Or had she bolted on the spur of the moment?

  I went over the clothes in the closet—the old things she brought with her.

  Except for the school uniforms, of which there were three, it was class in every case, as I had figured. Tweeds were Harris or Donegal. Skirts and blazers were Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Cable Car. Nothing frivolous as we’d bought yesterday on our little downtown spin. Even the shoes were respectable.

  But all of it was used, definitely, some of it probably made before she was born. Not likely any of it had been hers before she had hit the streets. This was too puzzling.

  In the pockets I found New York theater ticket stubs, something from a recent concert in San Francisco. Matchbooks from the big hotels. The Fairmont, the Stanford Court,
the Hyatt Regency.

  It troubled me, this. I didn’t want to think about what she’d been doing in all those hotels. But maybe she was simply roaming the lobbies, homing to places like those in which she’d once lived. Looking for some way back into the adult world.

  But her recent past wasn’t the point. We were going to destroy all that together. It was the real past that mattered. And there was nothing here to tell me the slightest thing about her. It was downright scary. Even the tapes had only those commercial labels. The best clue so far was Susan Jeremiah.

  I got out the magazines, sat down on the side of the brass bed, and read through them.

  Well, this was an interesting woman all right. Born on a Texas ranch, went to school in Dallas, later in LA. Was making movies with a home camera when she was ten. Worked in her teens for a Dallas TV station. Final Score, which had won accolades at Cannes, was described as atmospheric, fast-paced, philosophical. Done on location in the Greek islands, it concerned a gang of nihilistic young Texan dope smugglers. Film buff talk about handheld cameras, artistic debts to Orson Welles, the Nouvelle Vague, philosophical approach, that sort of thing. All too short. On to another woman director, New Yorker, featured in the same article.

  The Newsweek piece wasn’t much better. Focus on the April television film Bitter Chase, praised for a “a high quotient of visual beauty, something often altogether absent from films made for television.” Jeremiah would make two more for United Theatricals, but didn’t want to be stigmatized as a television director. Heavy praise for the star of the film, Dallas girl Sandy Miller, who had also starred in Jeremiah’s “arty and often self-indulgent erotic film,” Final Score, never released in this country. But oddly enough, the only picture in the magazine was of Jeremiah. I think that Texas getup and that lean frontier face really got them. Too bad for Sandy Miller.

  I sat there more confused than ever and feeling pretty damned guilty. I wanted to take those videotapes down, run them through the machine in my office. Or better yet, the machine in the den. The den door had a lock on it. And that way if she came in—

  Oh, but how would she ever forgive me if she found out what I was doing? And what if I just brought up the tapes in conversation? She might explain everything. No need to betray her at all this way, because maybe this stuff had nothing to do with who she was.

  It was ten forty-five. I had to get going.

  DAN didn’t show until noon. I apologized for keeping him from lunch. “Look,” I said. “This is client-lawyer privilege.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You kill somebody?” He sat down opposite me behind the desk. “You want some lunch? I’m sending out for a sandwich.”

  “No. I’ll make this as quick as I can. I want you to do some detective work.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You have to do it yourself. You can’t hire anybody from an agency. You have to do what you can by phone, and then if you have to travel, I’ll pay for it.”

  “Do you know what that will cost you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You have to find out something for me.”

  “Which is what?”

  “The identity of this girl,” I said. I handed him my photos of her. He studied them for a moment.

  “This is absolutely confidential,” I said. “You cannot let anyone know who wants to know all this.”

  “Come on,” he said impatiently, shaking his head. “Fill me in. What am I looking for?”

  “She’s sixteen,” I said.

  “Uh huh.” He was studying the picture.

  “Till two days ago she was on the street. She says her name’s Belinda. That may or may not be true. She’s been all over Europe, grew up in Madrid, she said, spent time in Rome, Paris. She was in New York this winter, I’m pretty certain of that. I don’t know when she got here.” I described the theater programs, the top-price tickets.

  “She’s maybe five foot four. No taller than that. One hundred pounds, maybe a little more. Hair, face, you can see. Her body is very grown-up. Full breasts. Her voice is grown-up, too, very grown-up, but no accent except for a touch of something I can’t place. I don’t know if that would help anyway.”

  “What’s your connection with her?”

  “I’m living with her.”

  “You’re what!”

  “I don’t want to hear about it. I want to know who she is, where she came from—”

  “—You don’t want to hear about it! She’s sixteen? And you don’t want to hear about it!”

  “—But I want to know more than that. I want to know why she ran away, what happened. I’m pretty sure there’s money mixed up in it. She’s too well educated, her taste is too good. There has to be a family somewhere with money. Yet it doesn’t add up. It’s strange. I want to know everything you can possibly—”

  “Jeremy, this is crazy.”

  “Don’t talk, Dan. I’m not finished.”

  “Do you know what this could mean if you’re caught with this kid?”

  “I want to know how she got to be where she is. Who she’s hiding from? I’ll tell you the strangest thing. I went through her belongings and there’s not a single clue to her real identity.”

  “You crazy son of a bitch. Do you realize what this could do to you?

  Jeremy, do you remember what happened to Roman Polanski?”

  “I remember.”

  And what was all that rot I had told Alex Clementine about scandal not hurting anyone anymore? And he had said the right dirt in the right measure. Well, I knew in my case this was the wrong dirt, never mind the measure.

  “Polanski got nailed for one lousy afternoon with a minor. You’re telling me you’re living with this one?”

  I told him quietly and calmly about the Page Street address, the police, them writing down my address and the fake name Linda Merit in their notebooks.

  “I wish the cop hadn’t recognized me.”

  “Put her on a plane for Katmandu. Immediately! Get her out of your house, you idiot.”

  “Dan, find out who she is. I don’t care what it costs. There must be people you can ask, on the qt, without revealing anything, maybe some way to ask around at the street down there. I am almost one hundred percent sure someone is looking for her.”

  “So am I. Europe, money, education—” He picked up the picture. “Christ!” he muttered.

  “But remember, I have to know everything, who are her parents, what did they do, why did she take off?.”

  “Suppose they didn’t do anything and she’s a rich bitch who decided she wanted some excitement.”

  “Out of the question. You wouldn’t say that if you talked to her. In fact, the funny thing is, she’s too poised to be rich, yet she’s gotta be.” ‘q don’t get it.”

  “Rich kids are sheltered. They’re soft. There’s always a little naiveté shining through, no matter how precocious they are. The girl’s poise is deep and almost hard. She makes me think of the poor girls I knew when I was a kid, I mean, the ones who had big diamond engagement rings on their fingers by sixteen and two kids by a piano mover husband by the time they were twenty. You know the kind of girl. She can hardly read or write, but she can run the cash register in the all-night drugstore for five hours without ever breaking one of her long manicured fingernails. Well, there is something sad and tough about this little girl which is like that, something old. But she’s too educated, too refined for the rest of the image.”

  He was giving me angry glances in between studying the picture. “I’ve seen this girl somewhere,” he said.

  “At Andy’s exhibit the other day,” I said. “She was with me.”

  “No, I didn’t even know you were there. Missed you completely—”

  “But she was wandering around, in a pair of pink sunglasses—”

  “No, no, I mean I know this girl, I know this face, I know her from somewhere.”

  “Well, then, get on it, Dan. Because I have to know who she is and what happened to her.”

&
nbsp; “And she won’t tell you.”

  “Nothing, not a word, made me promise never to ask or she’d walk out. I know it’s something terrible.”

  “You mean, you hope it’s something terrible to get you off the hook with your conscience!”

  “Maybe. Maybe so.”

  “You think it will get you off the hook with anyone else, you’re crazy.”

  “Dan, I just want to know—”

  “Look, I’ll get on it. But in exchange you listen. This could demolish your career. Demolish, as in obliterate, annihilate, disintegrate, do you understand me? You’re not a European film director. You’re a children’s book author.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “You are putting it on the line, every nickel of it, if this gets to the press. And if her parents are rich, it could be kidnapping on top of everything. There could be charges I haven’t even thought of. I gotta look this up. I gotta—”

  You should see the paintings, I thought. But I said:

  “Dan, that can wait. Find out all about her.”

  Yes, definitely the wrong dirt in the wrong measure.

  So why did I feel this exhilaration, this warmth all over, this sense of being alive suddenly? It was like that day when I walked onto that jet plane at the New Orleans airport and knew I was headed for California.

  “Look at me, Jer! You’ll get the Lewis Carroll Kinky Old Man Award of the Year, you hip to that? They’ll pull your books off the library shelves and burn them. The bookstores in the South and Midwest won’t even stock them. And any Disney movie deals you can kiss good-bye forever. You’re not listening to me. You’re not listening!”

  “Dan, I have an imagination. Imagining things is what I get paid for. I love this little girl. And I have to know if somebody is out there looking for her, I have to know what they did to her.”

  “This is not the sixties, Jeremy. The flower children are gone. The feminists and the Moral Majority are joining ranks these days to get the child molesters and the pornographers. This is no time for—”I had to laugh. It was Alex Clementine all over again.

  “Dan, we are not in court. I am impressed. My rights have been read to me. Call me when you have something—anything?’

  I locked the briefcase and started towards the door. “They’ll cancel the Saturday morning show!”