Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [152]
Closing the door softly behind her, Margie glided across the hall into the galleried living area.
“Hello?” she called tentatively.
No response. Crossing to the staircase that spiraled up from one corner to the gallery, she called again, louder this time. Still no response.
No one at home. Good. Margie ran up the curving stairs, laughing out loud as she reached the top, shaking her shaggy blond head to relieve the dizziness—there must be something left from last night’s high after all. Now, where did Rory keep his stuff? Was it still the bathroom cabinet, or had he moved it? She didn’t have to look too far. An old crystal bowl, once used for the sort of face powder that came with a swansdown puff to flick across some pretty twenties face, waited on the bedside table. The white powder it now contained needed no swansdown, and Margie sniffed at it deeply. Trust Rory—whenever she ran out of money to buy it herself, or out of friends who had some, Rory always had plenty. And he wasn’t stingy with it either. God knows who had paid for it; it must have cost a fortune. He served it the way other people offered drinks. Margie pulled off the red suede French boots she’d bought at Joseph Magnin’s last week, and lay back comfortably on the bed to wait for Rory. Sure, he’d be glad to see her, why not?
The black Ferrari ate up the miles as Rory covered the distance between Palm Springs and L.A. in a record two hours. It would have taken him less if the patrol car hadn’t stopped him outside Bakersfield doing 130 miles per hour—that’d be a couple of hundred dollars’ speeding ticket. A couple of hundred! Jesus, that was nothing! Three quarters of a million was the amount he had on his mind! Three quarters of a million dollars! Shit!
Rory slowed down as he entered the city’s stream of traffic, weaving in and out of lanes impatiently, oblivious to the anger of those drivers he cut in front of, intent on his own problems. He hadn’t believed it when Bill had told him. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure he believed him now. How did he know that Bill wasn’t conning him, just telling him that “someone” knew—and that “someone” was going to the police unless he handed over three quarters of a million dollars? Bill was supposed to pay the same, of course, or so he said, and Stan too. That would make a total of two million and a quarter.
It was blackmail, he’d protested. “Sure,” Bill had said, “and what’s your alternative? Ya want them to go to the police? I’ll tell you, kid, you don’t mess around with these guys.”
A prickle of fear ran along Rory’s spine; “these guys” … who had Bill meant? Jenny had been friends with all sorts of people, and Bill had let it fall that the money was for those daughters of hers. He’d said that they were “protected.”
Rory was trapped and he knew it. Not only trapped, he was in hock. The studio would have to come up with a good part of the money as an advance on his salary, which meant he’d be in their power and unable to demand the raises he’d had in mind. Worse, he would have to cancel the purchase of the house on Benedict; in fact, Bill had already done it. Rory had been forced to sit there while Bill got on the phone and told the real estate woman that he’d changed his mind. He’d talked her into returning the deposit, saying that Rory had decided he wanted something bigger, maybe in Bel-Air. Bel-Air! My God, he’d be lucky if he ended up with a condo in North Hollywood!
Who, he wondered, slamming through the gears at the lights and heading toward Newport Beach, who were “they”? And how did “they” know? He still wasn’t sure that Bill wasn’t conning him, that he wasn’t just taking the money and pocketing it, now that Stan wasn’t there to double-check every detail. There was just one thing, though—Bill had mentioned a tape. Rory swung the car through the courtyard and into his garage, turned off the engine, and stared blankly through the windshield. There were only three people who knew: Margie, because she’d been around