Night of the Pentagram Read online

  “Did you put this here?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Dakota said.

  “I won’t be angry if you did. You just did it at as joke, to frighten me, right?”

  “Elizabeth, look at me. I did not make a voodoo doll of Joan Monaghan and put it in your dresser drawer. I’m your friend.”

  “Then how did it get there? I didn’t make it.”

  Dakota set the voodoo doll on the top of the dresser. “I know you didn’t. I mean, if you were a witch, would you be stupid enough to leave this where it could be found so easily?”

  “A witch? Someone did make Joan kill herself, didn’t they?”

  “Calm down. And keep your voice down.” Dakota went to the door to the hall and eased it shut. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to let anyone know we’ve found this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s – I don’t know, because it’s crazy.”

  “But this is proof,” Elizabeth said.

  “Proof of what?”

  “That Joan didn’t kill herself.”

  “You don’t really believe that someone else killed her, do you?” said Dakota.

  “Doesn’t this mean that someone wanted her to die, that someone wanted her to commit suicide? Do you think someone here at the clinic is practicing witchcraft?”

  Dakota sat down on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know, Elizabeth. I suppose anything’s possible. There are a lot of crazy people in the world, but if you want my opinion, I don’t think anyone made this with the intention of forcing Joan to kill herself. I think whoever made this left it here deliberately for you to find.”

  “Why?”

  “As a joke.”

  “What kind of a joke is that?”

  “A very sick one. By now, everyone here knows how your husband was killed. It has more to do with your occult connection than it has to do with Joan’s suicide.”

  “I don’t have an occult connection,” Elizabeth snapped.

  “What I mean is that we’ve all agreed Joan’s suicide was inevitable. It’s unfortunate that you were the one who found her. I think someone made this voodoo doll after the fact to try to get your goat.”

  “Well, it worked.”

  “I know you’re upset, but try to see this from an objective point of view.”

  “How can I when there have been two personal attacks against me in two days?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dakota, when I arrived here yesterday, I found a book inside my suitcase. Somehow someone slipped into my room and put this book in my luggage, some sort of book on Satanism.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty twisted.”

  “Why would someone do that? No one even knew me yet.”

  “Obviously someone knew about the way your husband was killed.”

  “Isn’t the client list confidential? I mean, did any of you know that Elizabeth York was coming here as a patient?”

  “Of course not.”

  “That leaves Dr. Abernathy and Mrs. Valdez. No one else should have known about me.”

  “What happened to the book?”

  “I gave it to Mrs. Valdez. I think maybe her grandson might have put the book in there. He’s the only one who would have had the opportunity, but, of course, she defended him. First that book, and now this voodoo doll...”

  “Try not to let it get to your head. There’s a lot of sick people here, baby, but don’t forget that’s what this place is all about.”

  “I bet it was Jewel who put this doll in here. She gives me the creeps. Have you seen the way she looks at me?”

  “She looks at me that way too. That just means she thinks you’re cute. I don’t think Jewel’s the type to play dirty tricks, unless you consider being written into one of her stories to be a dirty trick.”

  “I wouldn’t like that at all.”

  “Better stay on her good side, then. Come on. Let’s just forget about this ugly thing. I’ll put it in my room so you don’t have to look at it. We can show it to Dr. Abernathy later on, what do you say? Let’s just get your things moved in like we set out to do.”

  Between the two of them they only needed to make a few trips across the hall. Dakota remarked about the number of shoes Elizabeth had brought with her, and let loose with an unrestrained gasp of “Now that’s cute!” when she laid eyes on Elizabeth’s bubble-gum pink pants suit with matching sandals and scarf.

  “This is a Gucci original,” Elizabeth said when Dakota gushed over the white baby doll dress with giant black polka dots and matching purse. “Sven bought it for me.”

  “He must have been quite a guy, buying you a car, a dream house in Beverly Hills, and all these fabulous clothes. I wish I could meet a man with that much money.”

  “I didn’t marry him for his money.”

  “Of course not, sweetie, I’m just saying some girls have all the luck.”

  “Some luck I turned out to have.”

  Dakota’s eyes swept the room. Elizabeth’s clothes were neatly tucked away behind drawers and closet doors. They still had several hours to kill before dinner.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “Why don’t I get my astrology books together and we can go downstairs to the drawing room and I’ll start working on your birth chart.

  “That’s fun for you but what about me?”

  “You can tell me about Sven. I don’t want to hear any more about bloody pentagrams. Tell me about all the good times you had.”

  Elizabeth liked the idea. In the drawing room she pulled an overstuffed chair close to the table and curled up with her legs beneath her as Dakota laid her charts and graphs on the table.

  “Where shall I start?”

  “Tell me how you guys met” Dakota said.

  “I first met him when I auditioned for Illuminated. My agent arranged the reading. Here I was all psyched up for my first big audition and I mean big. I’d been on auditions before, but never for a lead role in a film. My resume at that point was nothing to speak of. I had a Screen Actors Guild card and a handful of walk-ons and television commercials to my credit.

  “Then Daddy passed away. I was devastated, as you can imagine. Daddy’s service was the same day as the audition. The funeral was in the morning and the audition was in the afternoon. Gavin refused to let me cancel the audition. I was so angry with him. I thought he was being the most insensitive cad in the world, but it turned out to be the right thing to do.

  “I hadn’t met Sven before the audition. I’d never even heard of him. I don’t think I’d ever seen a foreign film. So here I was meeting this tall Swede with a deep tan and hair so blonde it was almost white. Right away he reminded me of Daddy. They didn’t look alike, but they were about the same age.”

  “You have a thing for older guys?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Sven was the first man who really did it for me. He had the most endearing smile. I guess I was too torn up over Daddy’s death to be nervous at the audition. I mean, Sven didn’t intimidate me at all. His English was pretty bad and I remember some of the other girls crying that they didn’t understand what he wanted them to do. I just went in and played the scene with him. I’d memorized the whole thing, but what with the funeral and everything, I couldn’t say the lines as written. Sven read the lines opposite me, and I just played the scene to him, you know? It was supposed to be this love scene and I’m looking at this guy who is reminding me of my father who is reading lines written for an actor half his age and all the grief for my father just came pouring out and added a whole new subtext that wasn’t in the script.

  “One of his assistants asked me to wait around after the audition. I was so busted up from the funeral the last thing on my mind was how well I auditioned.

  “Sven told me I got the part and then he took me to Schwabs and bought me a soda. He told me I had a fragile, vulnerable quality that was needed in the part. Right away I fe
lt relaxed with him. I felt the same way with Sven as I felt when I was with Daddy. They both had a way of making everything all right.

  “So I took the role and we made the movie, and half the time when I was supposed to be playing a scene with Tony Perkins, I was playing it to Sven.”

  Dakota looked up from her books. “Tony Perkins gives me the creeps, ever since that Hitchcock movie. I mean, he’s cute and all, but I wouldn’t want to date him. I’d be scared to death to take a shower with him in the next room.”

  “Tony’s a great guy,” Elizabeth said. “He’s nothing like he was in that movie. But in Illuminated, unless you saw us in a two shot, you’d never know I wasn’t playing the scenes with Tony. I was playing to Sven, which made all the difference in how I came across on screen. It’s all part of the illusion, you know?”

  “That’s so cool. I love movies. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a director. You have to have a big brain to be able to visualize scenes in your head and then tell an actor how to perform the scene and know that it will all get pieced together in the editing room. I find it fascinating.”

  Elizabeth got up from the chair and ambled about the room. She shuffled through the magazines, picking up a copy of Look. The cover screamed, The Horror of Growing Drug Abuse. She wondered when Morphenol would make its way to the headlines. She riffled through the pages for a moment then tossed the magazine aside. “So where was I?”

  “Falling in love with Sven, I think,” Dakota said.

  Elizabeth smiled. “All through the production Sven was there for me, taking time out to listen if I ever needed a friend to talk to, making sure I had everything I needed during the shoot. He took me out to dinner almost every night. Nothing fancy – he wasn’t out to impress me. Sven wasn’t first generation Hollywood. He was a transplant from Sweden so film to him was about art, not all this phony business of creating illusion. Hollywood is weird like that. Do you know what I mean? It’s not just about the movie. It’s about every aspect of our lives as actors and actresses. The actors that you see on Johnny Carson and read about in PhotoPlay aren’t any more real than the characters they play in the movies. We’re really just personalities created by the PR men.”

  “I’ve heard half the leading men in Hollywood are more interested in chasing other leading men.” Dakota snickered.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Elizabeth laughed with her. “Oh, they might be seen on the arms of this year’s blond bombshell, showing up at the latest premiers together, getting their pictures taken together at celebrity fundraisers, but take a drive through Beverly Hills on a hot summer night and peek into the backyards and just look at all the boys dancing around the swimming pool. If America knew what we see on the inside, there would be a revolution at the box offices, and not in a good way.”

  Dakota said, “I guess it’s hard for some of those guys, having to put up a macho front for their adoring fans when deep down inside nothing could be further from the truth.”

  Elizabeth stood up. Her legs had grown stiff curled up beneath her. Now she stretched them and paced slowly around the table. “My point is that Sven cared about me, right from the start. He was the perfect gentleman. He wined and dined but he never laid a hand on me. Not that I would have lifted a finger to stop him. I wanted him, badly.”

  “Don’t tell me you were a virgin,” Dakota said.

  “I was popular with boys. I had lots of boyfriends at Hollywood High. If they were cute I might let them go all the way, but I always felt so disappointed. After all, they were just boys. I wanted someone with experience, someone who could take me all the way. A sixteen-year-old boy doesn’t know how to do that.”

  “Right on, sister!”

  “So we finished Illuminated. We went to the premier. Sven bought me a fur. He said I needed a fur if I was going to be a star. There we were, getting out of the limousine in front of Santa Monica Theatre, arc lights sweeping the sky, a thousand flashbulbs popping in our faces as we walked that red carpet. I felt like such a star, but it was really Sven’s moment. I was just frosting on the cake, but I wouldn’t trade that feeling for anything.

  “We didn’t even stay for the entire picture. Sven whispered in my ear, had I ever been to Mexico, and I said ‘no’, and next thing we were on the road in an antique Packard he borrowed from the studio. We were in Ensenada by sunrise. It was so beautiful there in that tiny village watching the sun come up across the desert. And that’s when he asked me to marry him. Of course I said ‘yes’. He bought a bucket of red roses from a barefoot urchin, gave the boy a five-dollar bill, and then we walked to the nearest church and were married.”

  “The perfect Hollywood ending,” Dakota said.

  “It should have been.”

  Chet entered the room from the hall wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. He made a beeline for the bar and poured a few stiff fingers of vodka into a glass, tossed it back and immediately poured a refill.

  Elizabeth and Dakota stared at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Dakota, “Must have been a rough session with Dr. Abernathy.”

  “Aren’t they always?”

  “Tell me about it,” Dakota said and began to gather up her books and dumped them into her tote bag. “Well, this is my cue.” She disappeared down the hallway toward Dr. Abernathy’s office.

  Elizabeth watched as Chet finished off his second drink.

  “What?” he said again.”

  “You look so much like Martin Milner.”

  “I get that all the time. Personally I don’t see the resemblance.” He slammed the glass down on the sideboard and smacked his lips. “That hit the spot. After a session with Dr. Abernathy I could polish off an entire bottle.” Glancing at his watch, he said, “Time for a swim before dinner. Care to join me?”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” she said. She didn’t feel like swimming. She was far too self-conscious about her emaciated frame to appear in front of the other guests in something as revealing as a swimsuit. At the same time she didn’t want to be alone. She went upstairs and changed into a bright yellow sundress and sandals, and then picking up the copy of Goodbye, Babylon Jewel had given her, she headed out to the pool area to join the others.

  She stepped out onto the terrace in time to see Bobby take a running jump from the diving board. He spun through the air, head over heels, water exploding everywhere as his body hit the pool. Bryce and Jewel were huddled together laughing over some shared secret, but as the water drenched her books and papers she let out with a string of profanities. Bobby only laughed at her, climbing out of the pool and flicking his long wet hair out of his face.

  “Do that again, little man, and you won’t live to regret it,” Jewel shrieked at him.

  Bryce winked at Elizabeth as she pulled up a lounge chair near Jewel. As she settled into the chair, Bryce sauntered across the white flagstone tiles and struck a series of poses.

  “What the hell is that supposed to be?” asked Jewel.

  Bryce balanced on his toes in an odd stance, his arms moving in slow motion around him.

  “Thai Chi, ain’t it?” Bobby said. “Show me how to do it, would you?”

  Elizabeth found her place in her book and set it open on her lap. Though it was overcast, the afternoon was still warm. She wondered how long it would take her fair skin to burn in this weather. Chet and Bobby and Bryce had well cultivated tans, but Jewel was still as white as a sheet considering she seemed to spend every waking hour out by the pool.

  She wondered how everyone could be so cheerful after what had happened the night before. She didn’t expect anyone to mourn deeply for Joan Monaghan, but the others carried on as if nothing had happened, as if another guest’s suicide was simply part of the daily routine. Were they really that callous or was it only her perspective? Maybe she was being overly sensitive to the situation.

  Elizabeth could feel Jewel’s eyes ogling her from behind her sunglasses. It would be too obvious if sh
e moved her chair away now. She picked up the book and tried to immerse herself in the bed hopping shenanigans of Babylon Rivers.

  She couldn’t focus her attention on the story. The pages appeared too bright and the light hurt her eyes. Her gaze drifted away from the book to watch Chet paddle lazily on his back in the pool and Bryce teaching basic Thai Chi moves to Bobby. She closed her eyes, letting herself become immersed in the weave of life as it spun around her.

  In her mind’s eye an image emerged, like a Polaroid photograph developing before her eyes. The smooth gray field began to take indistinct forms and colors, and as it sharpened into focus she recognized the living room of the house on Mulholland Drive, white, clean and neat as it had been before. The photograph was replaced by another, like a slideshow from a Kodak carousel. In the second photo, she and Sven stood happily facing the camera. Elizabeth smiled, warmed by the memory. But the third photograph was something out of a coroner’s book. Blood dripped from the obscene pentagram on the wall, running in rivulets down the front of the couch and onto the floor where Sven lay butchered in his bloodbath. She was about to open her mouth to scream when an indistinct shape moved in front of the image of the pentagram. She couldn’t quite make out what it was. It was amorphous, fuzzy and gray. It almost looked like someone holding their finger in front of the camera lens, yet the shape looked somehow familiar. She felt a knot form in her stomach as the recognition reached out to her.