Ramona smoothed her gown and patted at her hair. I pegged the reaction as the class of a well-bred hophead. Her voice was pure cold Sprague: “You didn’t tell, did you?”
I picked up the gun and put it in my pocket, then looked at the woman. She had to be jacked on a twenty-year residue of drugstore hop, but her eyes were so dark that I couldn’t tell if they were pinned or not. “Are you telling me Martha doesn’t know what you did?”
Ramona stood aside and bid me to enter. She said, “Emmett told me it was safe now. He said that you’d taken care of Georgie and you had too much to lose by coming back. Martha told Emmett you wouldn’t hurt us, and he said you wouldn’t. I believed him. He was always so accurate about business matters.”
I walked inside. Except for the packing crates on the floor, the living room looked like business as usual. “Emmett sent me after Georgie, and Martha doesn’t know you killed Betty Short?”
Ramona shut the door. “Yes. Emmett counted on you to take care of Georgie. He was confident that he wouldn’t implicate me–the man was quite insane. Emmett is a physical coward, you see. He didn’t have the courage to do it, so he sent an underling. And my God, do you honestly think I’d let Martha know what I’m capable of?”
The torture murderess was genuinely aghast that I’d impugned her as a mother. “She’ll find out sooner or later. And I know she was here that night. She saw Georgie and Betty leave together.”
“Martha left to visit a chum in Palm Springs an hour or so later. She was gone for the next week. Emmett and Maddy know. Martha doesn’t. And my dear God, she mustn’t.”
“Mrs. Sprague, do you know what you’ve–”
“I’m not Mrs. Sprague, I’m Ramona Upshaw Cathcart! You can’t tell Martha what I did or she’ll leave me! She said she wants to get her own apartment, and I haven’t that much more time left!”
I turned my back on the spectacle and walked around the living room, wondering what to do. I looked at the pictures on the walls: generations of kilt-clad Spragues, Cathcarts cutting the ribbons in front of orange groves and vacant lots ripe for development. There was a fat little girl Ramona wearing a corset that must have strictured her bloody. Emmett holding a dark-haired child, beaming. Glassy-eyed Ramona poising Martha’s brush hand over a toy easel. Mack Sennett and Emmett giving each other the cuckold’s horns. At the back of an Edendale group shot I thought I could see a young Georgie Tilden–handsome, no scars on his face.
I felt Ramona behind me, trembling. I said, “Tell me all of it. Tell me why.”
o o o
Ramona sat down on a divan and spoke for three hours, her tone sometimes angry, sometimes sad, sometimes brutally detached from what she was saying. There was a table covered with tiny ceramic figurines beside her; her hands played with them constantly. I circled the walls, looking at the family pictures, feeling them meld into her story.
She met Emmett and Georgie in 1921, when they were Scottish immigrant boys on the make in Hollywood. She hated Emmett for treating Georgie like a lackey–and she hated herself for not speaking up about it. She didn’t speak up because Emmett wanted to marry her–for her father’s money, she knew–and she was a homely woman with slender husband prospects.
Emmett proposed. She accepted and settled into married life with the ruthless young contractor and budding real estate tycoon. Who she gradually grew to hate. Who she passively fought by gathering information.
Georgie lived in the apartment above the garage the first years they were married. She learned that he liked to touch dead things, and that Emmett reviled him for it. She took to poisoning the stray cats who trampled her garden, leaving them on Georgie’s doorstep. When Emmett spurned her desire for him to give her a child, she went to Georgie and seduced him–exulting that she had the power to excite him with something alive–the fat body that Emmett derided and only plundered at odd times.