The Bamboo Blonde. Dorothy B. Hughes
title Major Pembrooke was a dangerous person; that was written on him. She asked, “Are you here looking for Mannie Martin?” She added hurriedly to the flash in his eyes, “Major Pembrooke said that you were.”
The flash had faded. He answered as evasively as Con, “I wouldn’t object to finding him.” He held out his hand. “I must go. Maybe we’ll see you tonight anyway. Where are you dining, the Sky Room?”
“Yes. I suppose so. We’re meeting them at the Hilton.”
“We may run into you.”
She asked curiously, “Is Dare going to be with you?”
“Yes.” He repeated, “We may see you. Unless Dare decides not to go out.”
She had little hope that Dare would make that decision. Not the Dare she remembered. She watched Kew’s roadster, handsome as his face, make a turn toward the city. She would have to dress with competition in mind. It was ridiculous to have to compete for your own husband but there was no faint hope that the leopard had changed her spots in the intervening years. Con had been gone too many hours for that.
He didn’t return until after six-thirty. He was jaunty as he’d always been after seeing that woman, and he was slightly alcoholic. He didn’t notice that she was wearing the pale blue swiss, wide ruffles to the waist, a tiny ripple squaring the neck; he didn’t know the dress was a dream, that she’d designed it for Oppy’s favorite ingenue, and that it looked better on her than on the slightly bawdy young actress.
All he said was, “Hello, hon. Ready to go?”
She nodded. “Aren’t we a little early?”
“Thought we might stop for a drink on the way.”
“You’ve had enough as usual.” He wanted to go back to that truly sinister bar; even an afternoon with Dare hadn’t made him forget Pembrooke. She prayed the major wouldn’t be there.
He was whistling by the window when she returned with her army-brown silk duster. “Any callers?”
“Only Kew.”
He twirled. “Only Kew!” He seemed suspicious and then he was casual again. “What did he want?”
“He wondered if he’d left his cigarette case.”
“An ancient stall.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Why should he need a stall? He could come any time without it. He’s a friend of ours.”
“Yours. Did he find it?”
“No. We looked. He decided maybe he’d dropped it in his room.”
“Probably in his pocket all the time.” Con was disgusted. Was it that he thought Kew had come to see her and didn’t like it?
She hoped so. It would serve him right. She smiled in the darkness as the uncomfortable coupe rattled across the street fronting the bay. “We may see him tonight.”
She saw Con’s face turn to her in the street light. It was expressionless. That meant he was angry. She didn’t know why.
“Does he know where we’re going?”
“Yes–” she began.
“You told him.”
“Yes.” She defended herself. “I couldn’t help it, Con.” He’d stopped the machine in front of the Bamboo Bar. “He asked us to join him and Dare at dinner. What could I tell him?”
He stated, “I suppose you also told him who we were dining with?”
“Yes.” She knew she’d done wrong but not why or how. “What could I say?”
He started the car again, swore at the traffic light snapping red, and said above the noisy coughs of the engine, “You could have told him we were busy and let it go at that, couldn’t you? I asked you not to talk. Do you think I want him scooping me? Wives as a rule don’t help out their husbands’ business rivals.”
She hadn’t thought of their being in competition. Con must be after a story too on this Travis. She said, “I’m sorry.”
He shot the car ahead at the first warning of green, quickly leftwards into Ocean Boulevard. “Maybe we can beat him there and sneak the Travises out somewhere else to eat.”
It was no more than ten to seven when they reached the Hilton, but the Travises were seated there waiting. Walker was a skinny young officer with a round preoccupied face, pale sandy hair plastered above a recessive forehead. He didn’t look like a bright boy.
Kathie was beautiful. Even the white chiffon dress, obviously made over and without style; the blue street coat over it with the big pink fish pin on the lapel, didn’t diminish her beauty: the soft soot hair, the sad contour of her face, and her eyes, blue as early night, soot-lashed. The pin might have served as model for the bulbous examples on the beach-cottage cretonne, pink, with black spots superimposed on the enamel. No one with any taste could have selected, much less worn it. It wasn’t hideously smart. It was hideously banal. But fish or no fish, Kathie was exquisite.
Griselda looked at Con. He too knew that Kathie Travis walked in beauty. It had been too much to hope that he wouldn’t.
He was smiling at the girl, “I thought we might–” and then he broke off. Griselda saw where his eyes had strayed. White-linened Kew rising from one of the period chairs. He raised a friendly hand and started toward them. He was intercepted. Without her glasses Griselda couldn’t be certain, but it looked as if the man patting Kew’s sleeve was Sergei Vironova, Oppy’s favored foreign director. She’d done costumes for one of his pictures.
Con put his arm through Kathie Travis’s. “We’ll eat in the Sky Room. O.K.?”
Her smile was even lovelier than her quiet face. Griselda followed to the elevators with the dull lieutenant. It wasn’t fair that Kathie Travis should exist with Dare already here. In the stereotyped beauty land of movie stars, Griselda wouldn’t have been disturbed by any or all women. But Kathie didn’t need the Westmores or Griselda Cameron Satterlee. And Dare didn’t need anything. With gloomy foreboding Griselda watched Con bend down to the slight girl’s words as the elevator rose swiftly to the roof.
They sat on the terrace looking out at the sea that moiled in twisted currents to a once mythical East, land no longer of cherry blossoms and delicate things, land of drawn sabers and crashing bombs. A low parapet protected the diners from a sheer drop to the Pike below.
Con suggested the menu, said, “We should have stopped at the bar first. Care to investigate it, Kathie?” He had said he wanted to see Walker Travis; it seemed he’d mixed up the forenames. Griselda wasn’t surprised.
She was left with the negative little officer. She didn’t know how to make conversation with him; when she spoke he was a rabbit peering insecurely from a safe dark hutch. The weather, the night, Long Beach–he scuttled from each topic back into his hiding place. And then she stopped trying, watched silently the approach of Kew and Dare Crandall.
They came directly to her. Dare kissed her, crying, “Darling, I’m so glad to see you again! I told Con I was just furious that he didn’t bring you along this afternoon but he said you had other fish to fry.”
Dare hadn’t changed although she had let her hair go back to neutral. It looked as brown hair should, shining as if light were upraised above it. Her body, draped in white wool jersey, would alone make women distrust her; it had, as Griselda remembered, the sleek lines of a polo pony. She was talking to Griselda but the slant green eyes in her almost ugly face were looking at Lieutenant Travis. And Griselda could have cheered. After thirty-odd years, Dare had met her match. Walker Travis wasn’t any more impressed by her than if she were a waiter. He was peering into the lighted main room where his wife and Con were laughing at the great bar.
And Con saw him. Quickly he returned Kathie to