Belinda Read online

  The telephone gave its brief muffled ring. Out of the speaker came the sound of the machine clicking on:

  “My name is Rita Mendleson, I am, well never mind what I am. I believe I may help you to find the missing girl. I see a field full of flowers. I see a hair ribbon. I see some one falling, blood .... If you want further information, you can contact me at this number. I do not charge for my services, but a modest donation, whatever your conscience dictates—”

  I touched the volume button. Soon came the inevitable click, the inevitable ring in the bowels of the house below, where a young stenographer hired by Barbara sat at my desk listing each caller and each message on a yellow legal pad.

  The radio talked in the dark. A CBS commentator, coming from somewhere on the East Coast:

  “Do they chronicle the deterioration of a mind and a conscience as well as a love affair gone wrong? Belinda begins innocently enough, in spite of her nudity, as she gazes at us from setting after setting all too familiar to the readers of Walker’s books. But what happened to the children’s artist when his model matured before his very eyes, when his considerable talent—and make no mistake these are masterpieces we speak of, these are paintings that will survive even the most cruel of revelations here—but what happened when that considerable talent could no longer confine her to the playroom and she emerges the young woman in bra and panties lounging lasciviously on the artist’s bed? Do the last two pictures of this haunting and undeniably beautiful exhibit chronicle Walker’s panic and his eventual grief for the irrepressible young woman whom he felt compelled to destroy?”

  I fell asleep and I dreamed.

  I was in a grand house that was familiar to me. It was Mother’s house and my house in San Francisco or some beautiful amalgam of the two. I knew all the hallways and the rooms. Yet I saw a door I had never seen before. And when I opened it, I found myself in a large exquisitely decorated corridor. One door after another opened on rooms I had never visited. I felt such happiness to find this. “And it is all mine,” I said. Indescribable happiness. A feeling of such buoyancy as I moved from room to room.

  When I woke, it was five thirty and there was a pale rosy light burning through the textureless gray membrane of the sky. Smell of San Francisco in the morning, the cold fresh air from the ocean. All impurities washed away.

  The dream lingered; the happiness lingered. Ah, too lovely, all those new rooms. This was the third time in my life I had dreamed this dream.

  And I remembered coming down to breakfast years and years ago in New Orleans when I was a boy and telling Mother, who wasn’t sick then, about just such a dream.

  “It’s a dream of new discoveries,” she’d said, “of new possibilities. A very wonderful dream.”

  The night before I’d left New Orleans with all the Belinda paintings, the last night I had spent in Mother’s bedroom before coming back to San Francisco, I had dreamed for the second time in my life this dream. I’d woken to the rain lashing at the screens. And I’d felt Mother was close to me, Mother was telling me again that it was a very wonderful dream. That was the only time I really felt Mother since I had come home.

  Paintings had come into my mind then, whole and complete paintings that I would do when Belinda and I were together again. How private and wonderful it had been, a whole new series springing to life so naturally, as if it could not be stopped.

  The canvases were huge and grand like the rooms in the dream. They were of the landscape and the people of my childhood, and they had the power and scope of history paintings, but they were not that. “Memory paintings,” I had said to myself that last night in New Orleans, going out on the porch and letting the rain wash me. The atmosphere of the old Irish Channel streets came back to me, Belinda and I walking, the giant breadth of the river suddenly at my feet.

  I saw the old parish churches in these paintings, I saw the people who lived in the old streets. The &lay Procession, that was to be the first of these paintings, surely, with all the children in their white clothes and the women, in flowered dresses and black straw hats, on the sidewalks, with their rosaries, and the little shotgun cottages behind them with their gingerbread eaves. Mother could be in this picture, too. A great thronged incandescent painting, awesome as it was grotesque, the faces of the common people I had known stamped with their sometime brutality, the whole gaudy and squalid, and tender with the details of the little girls’ hands and their pearl rosaries and their lace. Mother with her black gloves and her rosary, too. The blood-red sky, yes, as it was so often over the river, and maybe the untimely rain falling at a silver slant from lowering clouds.

  The second painting would be The Mardi Gras. And I saw it as clearly now in San Francisco, lying as I was on the attic floor, as I had seen it that last stormy night back home. The great glittering papier-mâché floats shivering as they were pulled beneath the branches of the trees, and the drunken black flambeaux carriers dancing to the beat of the drums as they drank from their pocket flasks. One of the torches has fallen into a float crowded with satin-costumed revelers. Fire and smoke rise upwards like the graphic depiction of an open-mouthed roar.

  The morning light was brighter now over San Francisco, but the fog was still solid, and the gray walled the windows of the studio. Everything was bathed in a cold luminous light. The old rat and roach paintings looked like dark windows into another world.

  My soul ached. My heart ached. And yet I felt this happiness, the happiness of the paintings yet to be done. I wanted so badly to begin. I looked down at my hands. No paint left on them after so many days of being away from it. And the brushes there waiting, and this light pouring in

  “But what does it all mean without you, Belinda?” I whispered. “Where are you, darling? Are you trying to get through, or is anger because of your silence, anger and the unwillingness to forgive? Holy Communion, Belinda. Come back to me.”

  [6]

  ON the morning cable news we saw the noon lines outside the theater in New York that was showing Final Score. The New York Times had already given the picture a rave.

  “As for the ingénue herself, she is irrepressibly appealing. The distasteful publicity surrounding her is simply forgotten once she appears. But one can not help but wonder at the contradictions and ironies of a legal system that is absolutely compelled to brand this well-endowed and obviously sophisticated young actress a delinquent child.”

  Cable News Network at noon carried a spokesman from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A very private gentleman, he seemed, bald, myopic, reading through thick glasses a prepared statement. When he paused for breath, he would look at some distant point high above, as though trying to pick out a certain star. Regarding the acquisition of the Belinda paintings, the museum recognizes no obligation to judge the personal or public morals of the artist. The museum judges the paintings as worthy of acquisition. The trustees are in concurrence as to the unmistakable merits of the work.

  Then the New York critic Garrick Samuels, a man I personally loathed. “We seldom see an artist break out like this with such heat and force,” he said. “Walker demonstrates the craft of what we call the old masters, and yet the pictures are distinctly modern. This is a unique wedding of competence and inspiration. You see this how often? Maybe once in a hundred years?”

  Thank you, Samuels, I still loathe you. Conscience in order on all counts.

  I walked down the hall, looked out the windows. Same crowd, same faces. But something was different. The tour bus which usually passed without pausing on its way up to Castro, to show the gays to the tourists, had come to a halt. Were those people inside looking at my house?

  ABOUT one, Barbara awakened me from an uneasy nap on the living room couch.

  “A kid just came to the door with a message from Blair Sackwell. Please call him at this number from a phone booth at once.”

  I was still groggy when I went out the front door. And when the reporters swamped me, I could hardly even be polite. I saw the two plainclothes guys
get out of their gray Oldsmobile. I looked at them for a second, then I waved and pointed to the phone booth by the corner store. Immediately they nodded and slowed their pace.

  “Who are those guys, Jeremy?”

  “Jeremy, has Belinda called you?” The reporters followed me across Noe and Seventeenth.

  “Just my bodyguards, gang,” I said. “Any of you guys got a quarter?”

  Immediately I saw five quarters in five hands. I took two of them, said, Thanks, and closed the phone booth door.

  “Well, that sure as hell took you long enough!” Blair said as soon as he answered. “Where’s G.G.?”

  “Asleep, he was helping with the phones most of the night.”

  “Jeremiah’s man in LA just got through to me. Said Susan caught him on her way out of Chicago an hour ago. He wouldn’t even talk to me on the Stanford Court line, said to go call him from someplace down the street. That’s where you’re talking to me now. Now listen. Susan says knows for certain that Belinda was at the Savoy Hotel in Florence until two days ago.”

  “Christ, is she sure?”

  “When Jeremiah got to Rome, friends told her Belinda had been doing extra work at Cinecittá. They had lunch with her less than two weeks ago in the Via Veneto. She was just fine.”

  “Thank God!”

  “Now don’t come apart on me. Listen. These people said Belinda had been living in Florence and coming down to work a few days a week. Jeremiah put her dad’s confidential secretary on it in Houston. The woman called everybody Susan knew in Florence, friends of Belinda’s, Bonnie’s, the works. She hit pay dirt yesterday afternoon. Turned out Belinda had checked out of the Savoy on Tuesday, same day Susan left Rome. been there under her own name, paid her bill in full in traveler’s checks and told the concierge she was headed for the Pisa airport, she was going back to the States.”

  I slumped against the side of the phone booth. I was going to start bawling like a child if I didn’t get a grip on myself. “Rembrandt? You still there?”

  “Blair, I think I was beginning to believe it myself,” I said. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. “I swear to God, I mean, I think was beginning to believe she was dead.”

  There was a pause, but I didn’t care what he was thinking. I shut my eyes for a minute. I was still too relieved to think straight. I felt a crazy impulse to open the damned door of the phone booth and yell to the reporters:

  “Belinda’s alive! She’s alive!” Then the reporters would jump up and down and scream “She’s alive,” too.

  But I didn’t do it. I stood there, caught someplace between laughing and weeping, and then I tried to reason things out.

  “Now, we can’t call TWA or Pan Am for the passenger list,” Blair said. “It’s too risky. But she couldn’t have gotten through Kennedy or LAX until yesterday. And it was already front page news.”

  “Blair, thousands of people go through customs. Maybe she went through Dallas or Miami or someplace where it wasn’t—”

  “And maybe she went to the moon, who knows? But the point is, she is probably in California already, and she’s probably given up on the damn phones. I mean, if I can’t get through to you and .Jeremiah couldn’t get through to you, then nobody can get through. And I suppose you caught Moreschi this morning when he picked up Bonnie at the hospital, telling everybody about the cruel crank calls she’d been getting from kids claiming to be Belinda?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah, you said it, but Marty thinks of everything. He says the studio and the local radio stations have been getting the crank calls, too.”

  “Christ, he’s locking her out, does he realize that?”

  “So what would you do if you were her? Come straight here?”

  “Look, Blair, I have a house in Carmel. Nobody, I mean nobody knows about it except G.G. and Belinda and me. G.G. and I were down there last week. We left money and a note for Belinda. She might have gone there. If I were her, I would have gone there, at least to get some sleep and make a plan. Now if either G.G. or I try to drive down, we take these plainclothes suckers with us—”

  “Give me the address,” Blair said.

  Quickly I described the place, the street, the turn off, how the houses didn’t have any numbers, all that.

  “You leave it to me, Rembrandt. Midnight Mink is a heavy item in Carmel. I know just the guy to send over there, and he doesn’t even have to know why he’s doing it. He owes me one for a full-length coat I delivered to him personally just in time for Christmas for a beat-up old movie queen who lives in a falling-down hermitage just north of there at Pebble Beach. I spent Christmas Eve of 1984 at thirty-eight thousand feet thanks to that SOB. He’ll do what I say. What time is it, one fifteen? Call me at this number at four, if you haven’t heard from me before that.”

  DAN and David Alexander were just getting out of a cab in front of the house when I got back. We went inside together.

  “They want you to surrender at six P.M.,” Alexander said. “Daryl Blanchard has just issued a statement to the press in New Orleans. After speaking to your housekeeper there and the officers who interrogated her, he says he now believes his niece to be dead. Bonnie made a similar statement in Los Angeles when she was discharged from the hospital. But you can still make a deal on the minor charges. The public won’t know the difference once you are in custody. That is all they want.”

  “You gotta listen to me. She may be on her way here.” I told him everything that Blair had reported. I told them about the hideaway in Carmel. I also told him about the “crank calls.”

  David Alexander sat down at the dining table and made that steeple out of his fingers just under his pursed lips. The dust swirled in the rays of sun breaking through the lace curtains behind him. He looked as if he were in prayer.

  “I say, call their bluff,” Dan said soberly. “It will take them time convene the grand jury, it will take time to subpoena her letter.”

  “And then we lose our bargaining power as to the lesser charges.” Alexander said.

  “You’ve got to keep me out of jail until I make contact with her,” I said.

  “But how do you propose to make contact and what do you expect—“

  “Look,” Dan said, “Jeremy is asking us to keep him out of jail as long as we can.”

  “Thank you, Dan,” I said.

  Alexander’s face was rigid, completely concealing whatever were his true thoughts. Then he made some little shift in expression that indicated perhaps he’d made up his mind.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll inform the deputy district attorney that we have new information as to Belinda’s whereabouts. We need time to investigate. We will argue that the warrant for Belinda may be frightening and intimidating her, which is highly detrimental to our client’s position. We will push the date of surrender back as far as we can.”

  AT three o’clock a bellhop from the Stanford Court rang the bell and gave me a new number for Blair. Please call him from a booth as soon as I could.

  “Look, she’s been in the Carmel house. Today!”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Ironclad evidence. The newspapers open all over the breakfast table with today’s date. And a half-drunk cup of coffee and an ash tray full of half-smoked fancy foreign cigarettes.”

  “That’s it. That’s Belinda!”

  “But no luggage and no clothes. And guess what my man found in the bathroom? Two empty bottles of Clairol Loving Care.”

  “What the hell is Clairol Loving Care?”

  “A hair rinse, Rembrandt, a hair rinse. And the color was chestnut brown.”

  “Way to go, Belinda! That’s wonderful.” The reporters on the corner heard me yelling. They started running towards me. I gestured for them to be quiet.

  “You bet it is, Rembrandt! ‘Cause Loving Care washes out. How the hell could I do the wedding photo of you in Midnight Mink if her beautiful hair was permanently dyed brown?”

  I laughed in spite of myself. I was to
o happy not to laugh. Blair went on talking.

  “Look, my man left notes for her all over. But she’s already cleared out. And my line’s tapped. And so is G.G.’s at the Clift. And what’s to stop her from ringing your doorbell and getting stopped by the cops no matter what color hair she’s got?”

  “She’s not that dumb, not Belinda, you know she isn’t. Listen, speaking of G.G. and Alex, I gotta get word to them about this. They went up to Ryan’s Cafe two blocks from here. I’ll call you at the hotel when I get back.”

  I hung up and shoved my way through the reporters. Couldn’t say why I yelled, why I was smiling, really, guys, get off my back, not now! I gave a friendly wave to the plainclothes guys, then started walking fast up to Castro Street.

  I didn’t realize till I crossed Hartford that the reporters were following me, about six of them at a distance of less than three feet. Then there were the plainclothes guys behind them.

  I really started to get crazy. “You guys leave me alone,” I started yelling at the reporters. They just clumped together and looked at me, as if to say, Nobody here but us chickens. I thought I’d go nuts. Somebody took my picture with a little automatic camera. Finally I just threw up my hands and stalked up the hill.

  When I turned the corner, there was Alex in his fedora and raincoat and G.G. in a denim blazer, standing like two male models out of Esquire magazine in front of the Castro Theater looking at the playbills.

  “Jeremy!” G.G. shouted when he saw me. He waved for me to come to them quick.

  But I had already seen the marquee above them. The man on the long ladder was still putting the black letters in place:

  MIDNGHT SHOW TONIGHT—DIRECTOR ON STAGE IN PERSON. BELINDA IN “FINAL SCORE”

  “Jeremy, break out your black dinner jacket and if you don’t have one, I’ll buy you one,” G.G. said, as he took my arm. “I mean, we’re going, all of us, first-class, goddamn it, even if we have to take the gentlemen with their nightsticks with us. I am not missing my daughter’s debut this time around.”