The Glamorous Dead

by Suzanne Gates

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Set in the dream factory of the 1940s, this glittering debut novel follows a young Hollywood hopeful into a star-studded web of scandal, celebrity, and murder . . .
 
The chipped pink nail polish is a dead giveaway—no pun intended. When a human thumb is discovered near a Hollywood nightclub, it doesn’t take long for the police to identify its owner. Miss Penny Harp would recognize that pink anywhere: it belongs to her best friend, Rosemary. And so does the rest of the body buried beneath it. Rosemary, with the beauty and talent, who stood out from all other extras on the Paramount lot. She was the one whose name was destined for a movie marquee—not for the obituaries. And for an extra twist, now an LAPD detective thinks Penny is the one who killed her . . .
 
Penny is determined to prove her innocence—with a little help from an unlikely ally, the world-famous queen of film noir, Barbara Stanwyck. Penny met “Stany” on the set of Paramount’s classic comedy The Lady Eve, where the star took an instant liking to her. With Stany’s powerful connections and no-nonsense style, she has no trouble following clues out of the studio backlot, from the Los Angeles morgue to the Zanzibar Room to the dark, winding streets of Beverly Hills. But there’s something Penny isn’t telling her famous partner in crimesolving: a not-so-glamorous secret that could lead them to Rosemary’s killer—or send Penny to the electric chair . . .
 
“Suzanne Gates hits the sweet spot at the corner of literary and genre with her exquisite writing. . . . A captivating story of star-struck dreams and redemption.”
--Lissa Price, Internationally Bestselling Author of the Starters series

Release date: October 31, 2017

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Someone buried a girl in the narrow pass behind the Florentine Gardens. Two sailors dug her free and a crowd of us watched, late night, still in fluff costumes from our Hail the Indians dance.

Stany hit my arm. “Might not be her. Rosemary’s across town, think of that. She’s out dancing, and here we’re all worried. Didn’t you say she always comes back?”

“I can’t see. Let me go.”

One sailor lifted a handful of dirt. “I need a flash,” he said, and a flash appeared in his hand. He switched it on, and the light beam made his handful of dirt glow. He shook dirt between his fingers until a chunk remained, and then he yelled and dropped the chunk. It bounced and settled by Stany’s shoe: a thumb.

Funny how long we can stare at one thumb. I knew it so well. Who wore pink polish when red was the thing? Who bit that polish and scraped it with her teeth to a pink oval? And next to the thumb my friend Stany’s open-toed pump, bone leather, toes painted red, little ankle strap leading to her calf, her linen skirt, and around us the feathered colors of Apache Girl, Navajo, Chumash, still costumed for the night’s second show. We heard sirens then, and my eyes stung from mascara and false lash glue.

Stany hugged my shoulders. Stany, who two weeks ago heard Rosemary went missing and said let’s be friends but gave me no reason. Movie stars don’t say to Farm Girls let’s be friends, but she did, and tonight she hugged me, and tonight nobody recognized her. Tonight she was one of us around a dirt pit and a thumb, and Rosemary was the center now because it was her thumb, her pink polish. Stany leaned into me, and my breath wheezed.

“Clear out,” said a cop voice. Girls moved inside the club’s stage door. The two sailors clapped dirty hands over the grave and pointed to what they’d dug so far.

I watched like my real self circled above the alley and all Stany held close was a skin sack. I’m describing it now, and I still don’t want to feel. Stany told me it’s shock, and that’s what shock is. Stany was wrong. I knew about shock. I was circling. I saw streetlamps and cars down Hollywood Boulevard, scrolled front doors of the Florentine Gardens with its neon flashing Nightclub Nightclub, red velvet rope, and line of couples waiting to dance, square building, then its pitted rear walls. The stage door open enough for a long yellow triangle to cut light through the alley by trash cans, between dance hall and dorms. Three cops, two uniforms and one in a suit, and sailor hats I could see the tops of because I circled the air and pretended I couldn’t feel. Stany’s rolled hair.

It’s November in Hollywood, and the Florentine Gardens is the town’s best revue, and nothing I say can make you feel how I felt, sucking air, me in a short feather skirt. I was Cree Girl, and Barbara Stanwyck hugged me, I smelled my best friend in the dirt by my feet, and I thought, Keep that cop away.

The suit cop raised a notebook and smiled. A detective. He made me sit on a bucket he’d turned upside down, he gave me his coat, and Stany tucked it around my shoulders. My headdress wobbled, and Stany unpinned it. She never moved, not when the detective told her to. We stayed outside so the detective could watch us and still see his cops dig up Rosemary.

“My best friend,” I said. “Rosemary Brown.”

“You know without seeing the face?” Burned brown skin and round eyes. A fat Mexican.

“Who needs a face?” Stany talked for me. “Look at the thumb.”

It lay on the dirt, no blood, nail bed white around the pink oval.

“You are—”

“Barbara Stanwyck,” Stany said.

“Like the actress.”

“Just like.”

The detective wrote in his notebook. “Barbara Stanwyck, your friend doesn’t talk?”

“She’s terrorized. She’s asthmatic. She—”

“I talk.” I hardly heard myself. “I live there”—I pointed at the dorms—“with Rosemary.”

“You dance at the club?”

“Not really dance,” Stany said. “She’s in the girl revue. They parade is all. In costumes.”

“I can’t dance,” I said.

One uniformed cop had a shovel now. He dug around Rosemary’s shoulders, and the loose dirt built into a pile between me and the body.

“Why did you bury your best friend?”

“I didn’t bury her. I walked over a little hill, I didn’t know it was her, we all walked over her body for days before the hand got free. Then those sailors dug up her arm.”

“You walked on your best friend.”

Everything said to a detective sounds bad. Say a girl walks the hard, flat dirt from backstage to her dorm, and she does this again more times each day, then the next day a hill comes and she walks over that, but she doesn’t have time to think about the hill. She has to get somewhere, a studio or rehearsal, to dinner or bed, and she doesn’t think where she’s walking. Other girls do the same, all day, and we never think it’s a body we’re walking across. We have somewhere to get to. We have to make money.

“I guess so,” I said. “I walked on her. I didn’t know it was her.”

“You didn’t smell her.”

“Nobody smelled her,” Stany said. “Look at the garbage cans. Who can smell a body over that?”

“I smell her now,” I said.

“You parade at this club.”

“She’s an extra at Paramount,” Stany said. “She works on my set.”

“Sure,” he said. “We all work there.”

“So did Rosemary,” I said.

“Sure, all of us. When did you start walking on her?”

“Two weeks? I can’t remember,” I said. “I know Rose went missing on Halloween.” But I’d wished Rosemary gone every day since we’d moved to Hollywood. I didn’t tell the detective that. If not gone from the city, then missing, so each casting call the directors would look at me instead of beautiful her. She was the girl stopped by tourists, the girl handed free drinks, with a small nose and Hedy Lamarr eyes. She was taller than me. She had gold hair that I hated because mine was light blond, boring. She had movie star breasts.

The cop with the shovel stopped digging. “We have a face. Don’t let the ladies see.”

Our detective turned, and his body blocked the view.

Stany nudged me with her elbow. “The cop digging. I know him,” she said. She talked soft, so her voice didn’t reach the detective. “He works security at Paramount. A lot of these guys moonlight. Jim? Joe? Joe. Security. Good news for us.”

“Why good news?”

“Information, Pen. Joe’s our link to the case. I’m having a look.”

She left me and stood by the digging cop, both watching something I couldn’t see. I heard mumbles and some words—“damage,” “chin”—and inside the club, drums beat the beginning of the second show.

Maybe Stany was right. Maybe I was in shock. I couldn’t move from that bucket, and my skirt feathers stuck to my sweaty skin. Under the sweat I felt cold, and the detective’s jacket didn’t help. My legs shook, I think because they understood it was Rose they’d walked across and stomped on and smashed. In my head I got stuck on little things, like, where’s our rent, what’s my schedule tomorrow. I didn’t think about why Stany looked excited instead of scared, how many times did I walk across Rose, or why did Joe the cop stare at me. Those are the questions that come now, as I’m telling you.

I didn’t answer them. I was still on the bucket, and the fat detective shifted so the light from the cop’s flash shined past his body, and I saw in that light Rosemary’s beautiful yellow face with her eyes open and dirt-clogged. The cop was holding her head, and she was staring through me. I heard Stany say, “Why is her neck green?” and I vomited.

“Let’s finish our talk,” the detective said. “Forget what they’re digging up. We don’t see them. Where do you really work during the day?”

I wiped my mouth on my arm. “I’m an extra at Paramount.”

“Sure,” he said.

“I met Stany there. Hank Fonda, too. Rosemary and I got the job on Halloween, with a group from Central Casting. We work the club nights. Rose and me.”

“And I’m her friend,” Stany said.

“Not really,” I said. I looked at the detective’s dark eyes. “She says she’s my friend, but I don’t understand why.”

“You are worth having a friend like me,” Stany said. “Is that guy supposed to move the thumb? I’m sure it’s a clue.”

The detective said, “You work at a dance club where you don’t dance.”

“Right,” I said. “We’ve been Indian Girls since we moved to Hollywood. That was last April. Rose and me.”

“Last April. So that’s, what, seven months you’ve been in town? Seven and a half months? How old are you?”

“She’s twenty-two,” Stany said.

I said, “I am?”

The detective wrote in his notebook and closed it.

“I saw her last at the Palladium,” I said. “We went to the grand opening on Halloween. Can I have some water?”

“If I get you water, will you tell me the truth?”

“Sure,” I said.

He tucked his notebook under one arm and disappeared behind the stage door. I stood and dropped his coat on the bucket. “I’m tired,” I said. I watched Stany watch me. “Early call tomorrow.”

“You’re in shock,” she said.

I stood two feet from Rosemary’s body. A couple feathers drifted from my skirt to her yellow chest. The flash cop brushed dirt from her ribs. I stepped around the cops, the dirt pile, the hill of Rosemary, and I crossed to the dorm.

I must have gone in and climbed the stairs. I remember lying on our mattress in the room we shared with two other girls, but I don’t remember the girls coming home.

I slept, then I woke, and I recalled the night through waxed paper, all smeared except for her body. I thought and thought about Rosemary’s body, and why I should remember it so clear. Then I knew: She didn’t have clothes on. Someone cut off Rose’s thumb and killed her, and buried her nude in a place I’d have to walk over all day.

“I’m going to Hollywood,” I told Rosemary. This was last March. We sat under an old Washington navel that waved branches over the Knotts’ farm. Their berry canes stuck through the barbed wire property line. On my family’s side, the orange trees grew in rows for twenty acres and stopped at Grand Avenue. Rose and I sat two acres up and couldn’t see all the people in line down Grand, but we could hear them. Rose stretched her legs in the dirt, and we both breathed in orange blossoms. We lived in Buena Park.

“Hollywood,” she said. “Hollywood! What changed your mind? Oh, who cares, we’re going, who cares. We’ll be stars by next year.” She stood and twirled with her arms out. Her skirt became a bell. “I’m Ann Sheridan, I’m—no, I’m Alice Faye, I’m anyone but Joan Fontaine, who mopes like she’s dead, bless her, I’m Rosemary Brown—”

“Rose.”

“We’ll rent an apartment by MGM. The studio makes the girl. We don’t want anywhere but MGM. I’ll meet a director in three days. No, two.”

“What about Will?”

“We’re not married, Pen. He can visit. It’s not that far. I’ll need new earrings. I’ve just these, and look at them. And a dress.”

I could see her think up her options. She tilted her head, and a gold hair fringe covered her chin. Hair stuck to her lips. She twirled a circle, she danced in her dream Hollywood.

“I’ve saved eight months,” I said. I wore dungarees and red lipstick. “I have to leave here. I’m going. In Hollywood I’ll be somebody else.”

“Eight months? You saved and you didn’t tell me? I need money from somewhere. I’ve made forty dollars at Godding’s and I’ve spent it all. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Rose, are you listening? I want to go on my own. I can’t stay here. These trees, all those people . . .” I meant the line of people I heard beyond the trees, their mutters that reached me as claps and chirps of sound. I breathed and couldn’t quite get the air in.

“You’re selfish,” she said.

“I’m selfish, then.”

“What about Will? Your mom and Daisy?”

“Two minutes ago you said Will could visit. I won’t be far away. Mom doesn’t need my help with Daisy any more than she needs your help.”

“Now you’re selfish and mean.” She sat again in the dirt. “Look at me. I belong in Hollywood.”

She did. The sun skipped tree leaves and settled direct on her hair. The wind blew just those parts of her that looked better in motion, her skirt hem and two curls by her cheek. If it rained like it rained two years ago, to a flood, Rose’s wet blouse would drape her waist like a Greek statue. Perfect for film.

“It’s not the trees,” she said. “It’s that date. One date. You go on one date with an old friend and you keep thinking about it. I don’t get you.”

“So I can’t forget.” Across the barbed wire, through canes, in front of his barn, Walter Knott lifted a hand at me. A sort-of wave. He wanted to buy us out. I lifted my hand back.

“It was my idea to go to Hollywood,” Rose said. “For years I’ve dreamed it, and now you’ll go alone.”

“You never dreamed it. I’m sorry. You said you don’t get me, and it’s true. I’m not like I was.”

“Don’t I know,” she said.

“Please. Let me have this. Let it be mine.”

She lifted a twig and made it a wand, tapping her feet and knees. “I need trousers”—tap—“and stockings”—tap—“and another skirt.”

“Rose—”

“I’m going. You’re not the only one with bad luck. So he forced you a little. What do you think a date is?”

I could shift, lean on my side, and see down a tree row to Grand and the line-up waiting for chicken dinner. Through branches and thick trunks and leaves, I saw them: dollhouse families who didn’t care if the wait to be served was three hours. Before the flood, just a few people had stopped at the Knotts’ roadside stand. And now Mr. Knott, in a black town suit, walked with a clipboard from his barn to the back of the restaurant, where Cordelia Knott fried her chicken and served it with stewed rhubarb and goddamn boysenberry pie. He looked at me again and nodded. He knew he’d have our orchard within a year and a half.

I walked Rosemary’s hill for more than a week before she was found. After the cops dug up her body and smoothed the dirt—after it was flat again—that’s when I stepped around it. I came and left by the club’s side door, and I entered the dorms through the kitchen, but I’d gotten that dirt on my shoes, and dirt like that doesn’t wash off. I already had blood on those shoes, and now dirt, too.

The next morning it didn’t matter. I didn’t need shoes. We shot The Lady Eve on location in the Los Angeles Arboretum, by a pond edge with a skiff and Hank Fonda balanced inside. I was wedged between leafy cannas and a queen palm, behind a wood box that Paramount publicist Miles Abbott said held a snake but sat with lid open, empty. I wore full body makeup and a bandeau top. I carried a spear, and through pepper trees I could see the horses run at Santa Anita. Deep hoof thuds from the racetrack next door rose in the arboretum through my bare feet.

“. . . and I want that snake back, now. You—Amazon Girls. Eyes off Seabiscuit. Bet horses on your own time.”

What snake? I stood in a line of ten Amazon Girls. We all watched Hank in his Amazon gear. Khaki breeches, pith helmet. A beautiful man. Something moved at my feet, and I looked down.

That snake. My grass patch. Little snake flecks stuck dull on the grass at my feet. They caught sun and sparkled. Emma the snake slid by the cannas and disappeared into a fern bank.

From the skiff in the pond, Hank shouted, pointing. “Left, left! Here, Abbott—behind the rock.” Abbott ran to a rock, and I saw Emma’s quick tail flash. Hank called from the skiff, “Abbott! No, stage right. Go slow—she’s shedding. Or molting. What the hell it’s called.”

Then I saw Joe the cop. Sun shone off his black hair. He wore shades, and his cheekbones looked high and shiny, like the Indians I’ve seen on street curbs in Tijuana. Joe wasn’t a cop today. He wore security brown and a Paramount cap.

“Why are you here?” He stopped two feet from me, too close. “After last night. You couldn’t take a day?”

“You think Abbott would give me a day off?”

“Your best friend died.”

“Yeah. Step back, I’m on my mark here. I can’t move. A little more.” I pointed at Hank in the skiff. “You block my view.”

Joe, night cop, thought I didn’t care about Rose. He thought last night was nothing for me, a missed show, no tips. He thought I woke this morning excited to ride the Paramount van from Hollywood to almost the mountains, one girl whispering to another, all looking at me without really looking. He didn’t see that Rose was beside me on the van. She stood next to me in the jungle. Her green neck sputtered blood, and when I turned to her, she vanished.

“Why do you act strange?” he said. “The other girls hate you. These other girls.” The extras, he meant. The Amazons beside me. “If their best friend died, do you think they’d be here today?”

Yes. Maybe they all had dead friends beside them. I couldn’t tell. I knew not one would miss film time and the chance to wear a bandeau in front of Hank Fonda. And what if she did miss? Back to Central Casting and cattle calls and crowd scenes in Air Corps training films. Better to be haunted than looking for a job.

Preston Sturges, director, sat in his chair at the pond. He drank from a flask and yelled to actor William Demarest, “Bill! Before she throws the spear, kick her.”

“Kick her? I won’t kick a woman!”

“She’s not a woman, she’s an Amazon. It’ll be funny,” Sturges said. “You kick her and growl, you know how you do, and say, ‘I’ve got enough woman trouble.’ Then Sweetie puts the wreath on your neck.”

“I’m not kicking a woman.”

“Don’t really kick her,” Sturges said. “Just half-kick her. Then say, ‘I’ve got enough woman trouble.’”

“Sure, and who picks me up when the Amazon kicks back?”

“Growl like that, Bill. Perfect. Where’s the snake?”

Lost snake in the Amazon. Joe leaned in, bent so his lips touched my ear, and his touch made me shudder and wheeze, and he whispered, “I’ll arrest you for murder. At the end of the murderess hall is the door. You only go through that door once. The gas clicks on.”

“There’s the snake.”

“Where?” He jumped.

I’d left my shoes twenty feet from my mark. I had blood on those shoes. Rose’s blood, from what happened on Halloween. Joe would arrest me and take my shoes and find Rose’s blood. He’d match the blood type. He’d take my fingerprints, and he’d match my prints to the room where Rose bled. I’d touched the room all over. Glass, window frame, ladder. Fingerprints and blood. They didn’t mean anything yesterday, before Rose was found. They didn’t mean much this morning, when dead Rose followed me on the van and floated behind cannas and palm trees. But now, if they led to a hall and a gas chamber at the end, the shoes and prints said I was her killer.

Get rid of the shoes. The blood wouldn’t be noticed unless I wore the shoes. They were black, and Rose’s blood had seeped into the crease between leather and crepe sole. I could see the stains if I looked close, and if Joe arrested me, he’d look at everything I’d worn to the Amazon. I couldn’t wipe my prints off the glass and the ladder, too late, but I’d get rid of the shoes.

And then what, walk out of the Amazon barefoot? Joe would find the shoes.

Buy more shoes with no money?

I’d have to steal.

“You’re pushing,” said the Amazon on my left. She hit me with her spear. “You’re blocking Hank. Where’s your mark?”

Through trees in front of me I saw the parking lot, trucks and vans, a pile of stuff we’d left at the edge of the pond trail. A line of shoes, ten pairs, mine with blood in the cracks. My throat had closed, my chest forced little breaths out and in, fast. I’d steal another girl’s shoes.

Not the Career Girls’. They’d know it was me right off, because they hated me. And they never wore black shoes like mine. Their shoes always matched their skirts, like they both dyed their shoes in a big Career Girl pot.

I dropped my spear and hunted for Emma, pretended to hunt for Emma, in back of the Amazons.

Amazon: “Get to your mark.”

Amazon: “He’ll see you.”

Amazon: “Let her get caught.”

They hated me. Stany was my friend, no one knew why, and now a dead girl floated around, so they hated me more. I cut through the trees at the far end of the Amazon line, through two scratchy bushes and rocks that made me hop on each leg. Down by the clearing, Abbott ran between shrubs and palm trunks. Snake here? Snake there? Preston and Bill Demarest argued. And Hank floated in his little boat. Joe. Where was Joe?

I crouched by the pond trail. Each girl had a handbag or sack, a brush, lunch maybe, a pair of shoes on top.

Shoes! It was like a street market. Femme Fatale? Her shoes had fat heels and a buckle with rhinestones. I needed shoes like mine so I could exchange, not steal exactly. Shoes like the Wallflowers’ or Old Maid’s.

No, not the Old Maid’s. Her shoes sat like gray boxes. They hooked on the sides. No man would marry those shoes.

Wallflowers, then. They both had black shoes, one with ankle straps like mine but cuter than mine and newer, and that Wallflower wore glasses, so she’d see half what she needed to. I checked the Amazon line, all girls with spears up, heads down, on snake watch. I lifted my shoes in one hand and duck-walked the shoe line to the Wallflower’s pile. I squatted and grabbed her shoes. Nice shoes, shiny. It hurt to hold them because I had a long, red scab on my palm. A hurt palm, from Halloween.

“The snake’s over here?” Joe stood behind me. I hadn’t heard him come. “Snake in your shoes?” Joe asked. He squatted beside me. He put one hand on my back, above the bandeau, on top of brown makeup base, over two deep scars that rose and sank in skin globs. I have two scars on my back, souvenirs from my one date with an old friend, and Joe rubbed each of them with his hand. Tears hit the brown base at my eyes, and I wiped them. Now my eyes stung. My chest burned from wheezing, and I had tight skin. My skin stretched under Joe’s hand until I thought it would split, from Joe’s hand out, to each shoulder and around.

He took the Wallflower’s shoes and flipped them. He showed me their insides. “See? No snake. What’s the big C written in here? What are you doing with two pairs?”

“Hold it.” Abbott’s voice, close. “Don’t move. I got her. Farm Girl, out of line. Don’t move, I said. Here—nice Emma, here—Preston, I got her. Got her.”

I dropped my old shoes on the Wallflower’s bag and I stood. I pretended I could breathe.

“Goddamn snake,” Abbott said.

Across the clearing Preston Sturges waved a hand to the pond. “Hanker,” he said. “Ready to shoot?”

Hank waved from the bobbing skiff. All ready in the Amazon.

In front of me, Abbott unwrapped Emma from his arm. He knelt and coiled her in the empty box by my feet. I shifted, and one of my feet hit the box. Abbott kept one hand on Emma and looked at my foot, then up my brown leg, the split skirt, then tummy, bandeau, hair snood, hot warrior face. He frowned. “Don’t move again. Bad enough I have to run after a snake.”

“Ladies!” Sturges yelled into a megaphone. “Lift those spears. You’re getting kicked.”

Through the palms, through the grass, I saw my bag trailing ankle straps. New black crepe wedgies, smudged from the arboretum walk.

Back at the Gardens in my dorm room, my new bedmate, Madge, answered the hall phone. I had a new bedmate one day after Rose was dug up. No weeds growing here, no sir, not at the Florentine Gardens. We replace girls every day.

I recognized the new girl from the Amazon. She pulled double duty, Paramount and revue line, like other girls at the Gardens. In my room Career Girls shared the second mattress, and a Wallflower slept somewhere downstairs. Now Madge complained, “I get the bad luck bed where a goddamn dead girl slept. Stany’s on the phone. I won’t be your secretary. It’s Stany.” She rubbed Amazon base off her hairline. She pulled the Amazon snood off her hair. She’d told me she was brunette, but I saw puddle brown. I picked up the phone in the hallway.

“Are you standing or sitting down?” Stany’s voice was still new to me, low and smooth.

“Standing,” I said. Every time Stany called, I felt sick and nervous.

“Sit on the floor then. There’s news.”

“Okay, I’m on the floor.” I stood o. . .