Before I Die

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

Kyra Novacs: Who was she? Where did she come from? Bob knew almost nothing about her, just enough to fall hopelessly in love with her. They were thrown together for business reasons and, believing her to be single, he threw caution to the wind.

But Kyra isn't single. And when her husband is killed in the midst of an argument over divorce, it falls to Bob's loyal wife of seventeen years, Susan, to prove his innocence ...

'Miss McCloy compels you to read every word' Observer

Release date: March 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

IT ALL BEGAN that September day when Bob came back after lunch to the cell he called an office and found a memo on his desk.

Mr. Dorfmann wants to see you immediately.

As Dorfmann was a partner in the advertising agency, his office filled an eighth of the whole floor space with windows on two sides. It was done in sober, masculine greys, relieved only by a
movable bar in yellow leather and chromium.

“Hi, Bob! Where you been? We got trouble and I don’t mean maybe. Lou Symington and her new husband are landing at Idlewild this afternoon.”

“Jesus! Does she have to come East so soon again?”

“You know Lou. She does as she pleases.”

“But——”

“She insists she’s going to shoot her new picture here on location.”

“Just one interview with New York reporters now and she’ll wreck her career. The bitch!”

“Sure, she’s that and every other bad word you can think of, but she’s also a Valuable Property. She represents God-knows-how-many million dollars to Tantamount Pictures, our
most important client. She’s made a dirtier mess on the rug than usual this time, but it’s our job to sweep it under the sofa and make the public believe she’s a sweet, simple,
young girl, who just needs a little more love and understanding.”

“That’s a tough assignment.”

“You’re telling me?”

“It can’t be done. Not this time.”

“It’s got to be done this time.”

“How about this one. Lou is a great artist. She cannot be judged by ordinary standards. Crazed by the death of her second husband, she needed love desperately and found it
with——”

“The husband of her best friend? That’s murder at the box office. I know because we’ve tried it already. Haven’t you any new ideas?”

“Give me a minute.”

Dorfmann glanced at the sweep hand of his watch. “You got sixty seconds.” He picked up a press release and began to read.

Bob’s mind raced the sweep hand. Louise Symington, born Hilde Pfeffer, had the dark, delicate face of a Murillo angel and the soul of a piranha fish that strips the flesh from the bones of
its living victim in a few seconds. When she first appeared as a child actress, in a stage revival of Dear Brutus, there was not a dry eye in the house when she looked up into the baby-spot,
at the end of the second act, and whispered, with a catch in her voice “Daddy . . . I don’t want to be a might-have-been. . . .”

At twenty she was already a Valuable Property. But, unlike real estate and bonds and other valuable properties, she was also a human being and not a particularly nice one. Her first marriage and
divorce didn’t bother her fans. She was young and inexperienced, there were no children involved on either side, and the ageing, male star who had caught her went on to other conquests. Her
second marriage, to a prominent director, seemed like true romance by the time Bob and Dorfmann’s other copywriters got through with it. The adventures of the pair were followed with devout
interest in all the fan magazines. But the second husband ran his sports car into a canyon one night, when he was coming home from a poker game in Hollywood with only a little blood in his alcohol
stream. Lou had no intention of remaining a widow and this time her vagabond fancy fell on Dick Grant, Tantamount producer, and husband of Lou’s closest friend, Gloria Wayne, another young
actress, who was the mother of three small children.

Even then, if everything had been turned over to Dorfmann’s boys, the divorce and remarriage might have been handled so blandly that the public would not have realized all that was going
on. But Lou was thoroughly spoiled by this time. She honestly believed that she could get away with anything.

She and Dick stayed openly at the same hotel in New York. Gloria, besieged by reporters at Malibu, was so unprepared that she denied everything. Dick had to call Gloria then and tell her that he
wanted a divorce. The reporters caught Gloria again in Reno, where she admitted, with tears, that it was all true and that she hadn’t known anything about it when she gave her first
interview. Lou and Dick, alighting from a plane at Los Angeles airport, made the mistake of boasting to reporters about their mutual bliss and adding a few tart comments about Gloria’s
selfishness in delaying their happy union.

All this had happened many times before in Hollywood, but this was the first time it had ever happened in public. That was a little too much, even for fans. The receipts at the box office began
to fall off whenever a Lou Symington picture was shown, and it didn’t help at all when the publicity department at Magna Films, which had Gloria under contract, began running tear-soaked
articles in all the fan magazines making Gloria sound like the persecuted heroine of a soap opera. But Magna had to do something to salvage Gloria and they could hardly present her as an
irresistible sex kitten after her husband’s public desertion.

Politely venemous letters were exchanged between Tantamount Pictures in Hollywood and Kincaid, Kinsolving, Dorfmann and Viviani in New York. K., K., D. and V. pointed out that all Lou’s
interviews had been given without their knowledge or consent and they were, therefore, not responsible for the bad publicity. Tantamount replied in rolling, bureaucratic periods which, boiled down
and translated, meant “Don’t let that bitch off the leash again!”

“Okay, minute’s up!” said Dorfmann. “Any ideas?”

“Christ, I can’t think of a thing! How can you whitewash a wench like that?”

“You musta known she’d break loose sooner or later after this third marriage,” said Dorfmann. “You shoulda been working on an angle all this week.”

“The trouble is the public knows too much,” responded Bob. “Usually we’re just hushing up some things they don’t know. But this time, we’ve got to hush up
some things they do know. We can’t say it didn’t happen, because everybody knows it did. Lou and Gloria were friends, Lou’s husband kicks off and Lou decides she wants
Gloria’s so she takes Dick away from Gloria and the kids. Lou and Dick don’t bother to tell Gloria until they are caught together by reporters in New York. Now that may be jake in the
San Fernando Valley, or even on Park Avenue, but it’s not jake in Pratt Falls, Iowa, and this whole country is Iowa outside New York and southern California. So . . .”

“So what?”

“Wait a minute.” Bob closed his eyes like a poet communing with his muse. “I think I’ve got something. What is there that we can change? We can’t
change the fact that Lou stole Gloria’s husband. We can’t change the fact that Dick and Lou let Gloria learn the news publicly from reporters. We can’t change the
fact that Gloria has three cute-looking babies.”

“If only it weren’t for those kids!” moaned Dorfmann, in real distress. “Why do they have to be so cute? Why couldn’t they be spastic or something? And why do the
fan mags keep showing pictures of them?”

“Because their mother’s under contract to Magna.”

Bob pointed out the obvious patiently. “But listen, Dorf. There’s one thing we can change. Just one.”

“There is?”

“Sure. We can get an interview with some has-been actor, or actress, who knew both families, and who will do anything for a buck, and we can make this has-been say . . .” Bob paused
for emphasis, then assumed his fan-mag voice—a sugary, almost prim falsetto: “‘Lou and Gloria were never really friends at all.’”

There was a moment’s hush as Dorfmann sat utterly still, awed by this daemonic inspiration. Then:

“Boy, I wonder if that would work?” He closed his eyes in turn and leaned his head against the back of his chair. Now he, too, was speaking like a sybil in trance. “I can see
it in print. Of course. The two husbands were friends, a producer, a director. They liked to talk shop and play poker together. But I honestly can’t remember ever having seen Gloria and
Lou together more than two or three times and, even then, it was always at some crowded public gathering, at Mr. Goldwyn’s or Mr. Zanuck’s. After all, the two women had very little in
common. Gloria is a sweet girl, but not an actress of the same calibre as Lou, who is so devoted to her art. Gloria was always thinking of her home and children. Lou, to her great regret, has never
had children and so her whole life is centred in her art. If they had been close friends, I surely would have known it, because I was very intimate with both families . . . And so on and on and
on and on. Is the public that dumb?”

“You cannot aim too low,” quoted Bob cheerfully. “The only thing we can change in this whole situation is the assumption that Lou and Gloria were close friends, but, if you can
change that, you change everything.”

“It’s a pretty big ‘if’. It might backfire. It might get us all in trouble.”

“I don’t see how it could. We can throw a cocktail party for Lou and Dick at the Waldorf this afternoon when they get in. Have all the columnists there, and plant the idea right
away. I’ll meet them at Idlewild and tell Lou she’s got to lay off the liquor for an hour or so and try to look and act the way she does on the screen. Hell, if she can seduce a hundred
and sixty million fans on film, she ought to be able to seduce a hundred and sixty half-soused reporters in the flesh.”

“It’s risky.”

“What else can we do?”

“Okay, we’ll gamble, but, if we lose, you’re out of a job. Tell Lou to look tragic and terribly in love, the way she did in that movie about Pearl Harbor. Didn’t she have
a fall on the set ten days ago? Say she injured her chest muscles, or her back, and she’s come East primarily to see a doctor. Take shots of her looking at Dick, when he doesn’t know
she’s looking at him. That lovely pan of hers lends itself to timid, wistful devotion. By the way—were they friends?”

“Gloria and Lou? Of course. The best of friends. It was Gloria who got Lou her first break in Hollywood six years ago.”

Dorfmann sighed. “Have you ever stopped to think that this is a helluva way to earn a living?”

“Often. Yet there are dopes who would think it fun to work alongside a glamour-puss like Lou Symington.”

“They wouldn’t if they knew Lou like you and I know Lou. . . . When I was a little kid I wanted to be a fireman. There are times when I wish I had.”

“I always wanted to be a playwright,” said Bob. “I even got as far as writing a play.”

“And then?”

“I got married.”

“So did I,” said Dorfmann. “A fireman’s pay wouldn’t keep my wife in nylons.”

Bob had a sudden sense of disloyalty to Sue. “Aren’t we making scapegoats out of our wives ? If you’d really wanted to be a fireman, and if I’d really wanted to be a
playwright, we’d have managed it somehow, married or not.”

“Moon and Sixpence stuff?”

Bob nodded. “Sue’s never held my nose to the grindstone. I did it myself. Maybe that makes it worse.”

Dorfmann sighed again. “Funny how you don’t really mind the grindstone when you’re twenty or thirty or forty. But when you hit fifty, you suddenly look around and think.
‘God! There’s no way to go but down!’”

“You feel that way, too?” Bob was surprised. “It hit me right after my fiftieth birthday. I suddenly realized I’ve never been anywhere, I’ve never done anything and
nothing has ever happened to me. The kind of things that happen to people in books. And now nothing ever will happen to me. I’ll just go on, commuting from Westchester to New York, and making
enough money to pay bills and taxes. My life is a story without a plot.”

“The rats in the maze—that’s us,” said Dorfmann. “But who’s running this ghastly experiment? And why?”

Bob rose. “I’d better get on the phone to the Waldorf.” At the door, he paused. “You know what I want, Dorf?”

“A raise.”

“No, an adventure. Just one real adventure. Before I die.”

Dorfmann looked at Bob shrewdly. “Sexual adventure?”

“I don’t believe the word adventure means only that. It means something exciting, improbable, unpredictable and dangerous.”

Dorfmann’s laugh was loud. “What could be more exciting, improbable, unpredictable and dangerous than sex? That’s what you want, boy, whether you know it or not!”

LOU WAS FIRST off the plane, bareheaded and swathed in yards of precious fur, clutching a jewel case in one small, predatory hand. She was not at her
best. Her fur stole was too warm for the mild, September day and her face was greasy with sweat. She was hatless and the wind tousled her short, black hair, while the sun sought out the first faint
lines around her mouth, the first hint of bags under her eyes—flaws that lighting and camera angles glossed over when she was on screen. She hadn’t bothered to re-powder her nose. It
was shiny and slightly red.

“Miss Symington!” shrilled a female reporter. “I just want to ask you if—”

Bob ran interference smoothly. “Miss Symington is here primarily to see her doctor. She had a serious fall on the set recently and strained the muscles of her chest. She’ll be glad
to see any of you in her suite at the Waldorf later this afternoon, but, after this exhausting trip, she must have rest. At least an hour or so. Please let us pass.”

He had taken Lou’s arm and squeezed it gently, a hint that she was to pick up this cue. She gave him a mutinous side glance and turned towards the reporters. She was checked by the
hostility in their eyes.

“Please . . .” It was the velvet voice they had all heard on the sound-track. “I’m so tired. . . .”

Her husband moved in on her other side, trailed by her maid. She accepted escort meekly until they were all in the car, rolling towards New York.

“What the hell is all the God-damned fuss about?” she then demanded. “You’d think nobody in the United States had ever married a divorced man before!”

“I’d like you to read this press release,” said Bob. “It’ll show you the line we think you ought to take.”

“Let me see it.” Dick took the script. His face relaxed as he read. He was smiling by the time he handed it on to Lou.

“Take a gander at this, baby. These boys at K., K., D. and V. are smart and I think you should play along with them. You didn’t like those last box office reports any more than the
studio did.”

Lou glanced at the script perfunctorily and tossed it on the floor. “Okay, if you say so, but such a fuss about nothing makes me want to puke. What I need now is a drink.”

Patiently, tactfully, politely, Bob explained that she was to lay off liquor for just this one afternoon and try to look like a femme fatale touched by tragedy, aware that she had sinned,
but redeemed by the fact that her sin was for love—pure, sweet, romantic love.

“What’s all this jazz about my straining my chest muscles?”

“More malarkey to put you in good, kid,” explained Dick.

“Okay, okay, anything for dear old Tantamount.”

The rest of the drive passed in sulky silence. Bob studied the pair covertly and wondered what they really saw in each other. Lou’s youthful beauty was fading rapidly. She would be old at
thirty. Dick was already in middle age—a bald spot, a paunch, heavy lines around a sagging, disillusioned mouth.

Was Dick just tired of wife and brats and domesticity? And flattered by the attention of a famous beauty, fifteen years younger than himself? Did Lou feel she must have a producer-husband to
take . . .