[Celebrity Murder Case 09] - The Bette Davis Murder Case Read online

  “Oh, very nice,” commented Nydia. “It’s on the Thames. Be sure to demand a room on the Thames side. The views are exquisite. The hotel adjoins one of our best restaurants, Simpson’s on the Strand, the Savoy being on the Strand, as opposed to Simpson’s on Piccadilly, which is a department store that houses Fortnam and Mason’s. Good for American-style ice-cream sodas when you get homesick, which will probably be almost immediately. The Savoy Theatre is in the hotel. Gilbert and Sullivan premiered their operettas there; hence the term ‘Savoyards’ for those who perform in them. I feel like a human Baedeker. I must be boring you to tears.”

  “No, you’re not. Really you’re not. I’ve never been abroad in my life. I know something about England, mostly London, really, because we’ve a large British colony in Hollywood.”

  “Yes, I know. I met most of them at a reception Marion Davies held for me at her Malibu Beach house.”

  “I am impressed. The house is in Santa Monica.”

  “Is there a difference. It’s all sand and infidelities.”

  Bette laughed. “You learned a lot in just two short weeks.”

  “It was two long weeks. I was very bored between seances.”

  “Seances. There were seances?”

  “Forgive me, my dear. You didn’t recognize my name.” Bette was rarely flustered, but this was one of those times. “If you tell me you're an international celebrity, I shall jump overboard. I have to admit that when not reading scripts or the trade dailies, I don’t do much other reading.”

  “Quite understandable, my dear. You’re an actress, and that covers a multitude of sins.” She hastened to add, “And I’m not talking down to you or insulting you. I have an aunt who’s an actress, quite old and feeble now, if she hasn’t passed away in my absence. Well, she’s a dear old thing and was quite beautiful and quite popular at one time, but she once admitted that she read nothing but plays and theatrical magazines and on occasion would try reading a recipe, but gave that up as a lost cause because she couldn’t decipher them. Anyway, as I told you, I am Nydia Tilson. I’m a world-renowned medium. I don’t indulge in seances as often as I used to, for the delicious reason that my incredibly wealthy husband, Ogden, had the good sense to pass away five years ago and leave me with an obscenely incredible fortune and a charming lover. I assume he’ll still be charming when I arrive back in London.” Bette was astonished at the woman’s candor on such short acquaintance and said so.

  Nydia smiled. “There’s an aura above you. Not about you, but above you. On deck, even in the fog, I saw it distinctly. This aura marks you as being someone very special.”

  “I don’t feel very special.”

  “Of course you do. Why else are you fighting for your professional survival. I’ve read about it in the papers, and when I did I wanted to find you and say, ’Bravo!’ It’s about time more of our sex fought for our rights. I applaud you, Bette Davis, and it delights me to tell you as much.”

  The tea arrived, and after it was served and they began helping themselves, Bette said on the spur of the moment, “I wonder …”

  “Yes?”

  “On such short acquaintance, do I dare ask you to help me to find a furnished house? Quite honestly, I can’t afford the Savoy for too long, and if I’m to be here for the length of time I suspect I’ll have to stay, I’d like the comfort of my own kitchen. I love to cook, you see, and I don’t much like dining out on my own. I don’t know many people here, and …”

  “My dear,” Nydia interrupted swiftly and without apologizing, “you just might be in luck. I do know a house that will be available. It’s a charming old thing in St. John’s Wood, in Blenheim Terrace. The Terrace is a cul-de-sac, you know, what you Americans call a dead-end street. It’s owned by a very good friend of mine and next door to a house owned by another good friend, a dear, really, a writer. Of course, eccentric and very partial to eating apples but really a dear puss. The house I have in mind for you is owned by a world-famous archeologist.”

  “Oh, God. I probably haven’t heard of him either.”

  “Probably not. I suppose you haven’t heard of Virgil Wynn?”

  “If I admit I haven’t, will we stay friends?”

  Nydia laughed. “Don’t you ever riffle the pages of the National Geographic?”

  “Oh, yes! In my dentist’s office!” She continued after a sip of tea, “What is it that possesses a person to poke around in old graves? I’m sure they’re dank and fetid and depressing.”

  “They also contain priceless treasures.”

  “And archeologists claim them?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Nydia would grow accustomed to this annoying shortcoming. “Don’t they belong to the country in which they were excavated?”

  “In theory they do.”

  “Not by law?”

  “Well, archeologists and local officials play sort of a game of pat-a-cake with each other. Some of the loot is deposited with a local museum. That’s to assuage any guilt. Some good pieces are given to the officials themselves to resell to collectors for a very good price, usually.”

  “That’s bribery.”

  Nydia shrugged. “In order to acquire wealth, one must learn nor to be naive.”

  “That’s good. I must remember that.”

  Nydia continued the lesson in exotic thievery. “A good portion of the find is given to museums. The British Museum bulges at the walls with stolen goods. And finally, a very wise archeologist who knows the value of a pound keeps some of the best pieces for himself.”

  “I gather that’s how Virgil Wynn acquired his fortune.”

  “As ye gather, so shall ye reap. Virgil’s also a shrewd investor. He’s shared some incredible tips with me.”

  Bette said eagerly, “I hope our friendship blossoms to the point where you'll share some with me!”

  “How wistful you sound.”

  “I just can’t hold on to a buck. Sixteen hundred dollars a week sounds like a windfall to the initiated. But by the time my agent and my manager take their share, and my accountant and the household help, and with the money it costs to look like what a movie star is supposed to look like in public—” she paused to exhale—”what a sorrowful situation.” She flagged a waiter to ask him to get her a pack of cigarettes. “Don’t you like mine?” asked Nydia.

  “Oh, of course I do, but like all addicted smokers, I prefer my own brand. Are you sure Mr. Wynn will want to sublet his home to me?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean all those treasures he must have on the premises.”

  “Lots of treasures, all over the house, and wait till you see what he has in his basement. Rest assured, my dear, he is heavily insured against theft.”

  Nydia got her first taste of Bette’s New England practicality. “Oh, my God. Who does the dusting?”

  Nydia smiled. “Another treasure. Nellie Mamby. She’s Virgil’s housekeeper. She also bosses him around, although he’s totally unaware of it.”

  Bette had earlier come to a conclusion about Nydia and Virgil Webb. “Are you very much in love with him.’”

  Nydia sighed. “I was right when I said you are someone special. You’re very clever at deductions, aren’t you.”

  “I’m a Down Easter.”

  “Is that some special organization? Can anyone join.’”

  “At last! Something you haven't heard of. We refer to New England as ‘Down East.’ That’s me, a Down Easter, and proud of it.”

  “In answer to your question, if you still want it …”

  “I do,” responded Bette forthrightly.

  “I am not very much in love with him. Virgil isn’t the kind of man who arouses any grand passions. He’s about forty and attractive and very rich, but then, so am I very rich.”

  “And very attractive, and I refuse to guess your age.”

  “Don’t be coy. I’m thirty … er … seven … or so. To hell with it.” She waved her age away and poured more tea. “What Virgil is, he’s solid as a rock. He’s dependable. And very generous
. He supports his family.” She told Bette about Sir Roland and sister Anthea and brother Oscar.

  Bette said, “We have that in common.” She ticked off on her fingers. “There’s my mother; my sister, Barbara; my mother’s sister, Mildred; and between jobs, which happens frequently, I support my husband. He’s a struggling bandleader.”

  “Why isn’t he back home struggling?”

  “He soon will be. We’re getting divorced.”

  “How marvelous, my dear! I’ll get the word out you’re a free soul and you’ll be inundated. Englishmen are terribly partial to actresses! I’m referring to rich Englishmen, and there’s still a good proportion of them around and available. And those that aren’t available can usually be converted. Yes, I can see by the aura above you you’re going to do splendidly in London.”

  “Have mercy, Nydia. I don’t feel like a new man just yet.” Nydia waved the statement away to the same limbo to which she had consigned her age. “You will. Just give your emotional reservoir a little time to refill. Virgil knows a lot of availabilities. Too bad he’s going away.”

  “No it isn’t! I want his house!”

  Nydia’s face reflected concern. “I hope he’s feeling better.”

  “He’s been ill?”

  Nydia lit a cigarette while the waiter presented Bette with a package of the brand she had requested. Bette tore open the package. Nydia repositioned herself and crossed her legs. “The doctors can’t diagnose it. His own and some specialists called in for consultation.”

  “What are the symptoms?” Bette was genuinely interested, albeit selfishly. She didn’t want illness to deter Virgil’s departure. She wanted his house with the tenaciousness she would devote to attempting to secure her freedom from Jack Warner’s bondage.

  “He’s been having abdominal pains, accompanied by loss of appetite and fainting spells. And the poor darling is so vain; his hair has begun to thin, and though they’re not celebrated for it, the Wynns do have marvelous heads of hair. “ She made it sound like a cosmetic triumph. “Of course, that was weeks ago before I left. Perhaps it’s all cleared up by now. I haven’t heard anything since I departed. Virgil’s a very poor correspondent. I’m sure if he was dead it would have been in the newspapers. I mean, you do gather that in his own field Virgil is quite the celebrity.”

  Said Bette wryly, “Yes, that’s been permanently established.”

  “I’ve been beginning to wonder if what they say about curses can come true.”

  Bette was intrigued. “What about curses?”

  Nydia told her about the legend of a curse supposed to plague those who gut the tombs of Egypt’s ancestors.

  Bette was mesmerized. “I wish Jack Warner would go to Egypt and open a tomb.”

  “Hardly likely.” Nydia paused and stared into space. After a few moments, she spoke in earnest. “Virgil's father, Lord Roland, thinks he was cursed for having uncovered the tomb of Queen Baramar. She was seemingly quite an obscure queen, dating a long way back in the B.C.’S. Actually, Lord Roland came upon her tomb quite by accident. There was an earthquake in the Valley of the Kings.” Bette looked puzzled, so Nydia took a few moments to fill her in on the Valley of the Kings. “Anyway, there was this earthquake, and when the dust had cleared, voilả! There was the entrance to her tomb. Lord Roland, of course, was overjoyed, despite a few fatalities among the members of his crew. Of course, he had no idea whose tomb this was until they got to the interior and deciphered the hieroglyphics on the wall, a great many of which were quite obscene.”

  “Oh, what fun!”

  “How’d you guess? Baramar, it seems, was a brazen hussy who took to sex the way your Eleanor Powell takes to tap dancing. My dear! The positions she invented! Lord Roland tried to promote a book of them, but no publisher would dare print it. The Church of England can be so tiresome about that sort of thing. Roland made a great deal of lolly …” Bette was puzzled again. “… money, dear, money … by selling replicas of the walls to a lot of seamy establishments throughout Europe and Asia, but he was profligate in his life-style and was soon drowning in debt. By this time Virgil was establishing himself and threw Pater a life preserver. But Roland never retrieved his luck. So now he’s a terribly bitter old man.

  “Baramar made headlines when Roland discovered her, and Baramar won him his knighthood. Fourteen years ago, in 1922, the discovery of King Tutankhamon’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon soon turned Roland into a has-been.”

  “How sad.”

  “It is, really, because he's quite a decent sort. Eton and Cambridge.” They sounded to Bette like a dance team, but she refrained from any comment. “He couldn’t raise a dime for any further expeditions. He’s called on to lecture occasionally and to do some speaking on the wireless. That keeps him from going round the bend.”

  “Dare I ask?” Bette was chain-smoking.

  “Ask what?”

  “Didn’t Virgil offer to finance his father?”

  “Virgil needed, and still needs, to finance himself. Your American explorers usually have access to museums and wealthy universities. But here there’s not very much of that. And now, with the great worldwide depression, funds grow scarcer and scarcer.”

  “What happened to the men who unearthed the unpronounceable?”

  “Tutankhamon?”

  “How I admire the way it trips off your tongue.”

  “Dear Bette, he’s more frequently referred to as King Tut, as in ‘Tut tut.’” She waved some cigarette smoke away. “There was indeed a curse on Tut’s tomb. Lord Carnarvon was dead within a year. He was a great believer in the occult, very big on seances and mystic symbols. I’ve been trying to contact him for years, but he remains elusive. Probably too embarrassed by the way he died to come forward like a man and reveal himself.” She leaned forward and said darkly, “He died of a mosquito bite.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Not at all. Listen to this.” She had Bette’s undivided attention. “A soothsayer in Cairo warned Carnarvon to stay out of the Valley of the Kings. So Carnarvon decided to head back to London. Well, as luck would have it, his partner, Howard Carter, used some very heavy persuasion to get him to change his mind. Carnarvon had the money, Carter didn’t have a sou.”

  “So he strong-armed him to continue the expedition.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what happened?”

  Nydia was pleased to see Bette so intrigued by her narrative. “After the tomb was opened, and world acclaim and notoriety showered down on them, Lord Carnarvon was bitten by the mosquito.”

  “Malarial?”

  “No, just an ordinary, unprepossessing nuisance. The mosquito bit him on the cheek. The area flared up and a pus pimple formed. While shaving, Carnarvon’s razor cut across the pimple, and it became infected. With the infection came a fever, and it turned dangerous. His doctor treated the infection, or at least thought he was treating it, but Carnarvon continued to be seriously ill. And here’s the weirdest part. Several hours before he died, he went to see a movie!”

  “Oh, good for him!” Bette was pleased to hear Carnarvon had been a movie fan.

  “Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik!”

  “How ironic!”

  “Yes. The film was set in Egypt, and it was Egypt that did Carnarvon in.”

  “What about Howard Carter? How did the curse affect him?”

  “Oblivion. The same ugly fate as Lord Roland’s. Howard’s a wizened, sad old man living in a flat in the Albert Mansions, across from Albert Hall. I'm told he mumbles to himself a great deal these days.”

  “Probably because he has no one else to talk to.”

  “Lord Roland visits him occasionally, Virgil’s told me. I sometimes think there should be a home for aging archeologists.” Her face brightened. “But I must say. and I’ve told this to Virgil, who finds it perverse, I find the idea of a curse very romantic.”

  “I find it spooky. The very thought of a curse frightens me.”

  “
My dear, just look upon them as legends. And legends can be so romantic.”

  “I intend to be a legend.” Bette’s arms were folded, and her look of determination impressed Nydia Tilson.

  “The aura over your head tells me you will be.”

  “I’m serious about that.”

  “So am I.”

  “I know I’ve got what it takes to make it to the very top of my profession. I’m determined to win a genuine Oscar.”

  “Who’s Oscar?”

  “It’s my name for the Academy Award. When I received mine, I said it looked like my Uncle Oscar and I was quoted around the world.”

  “Somehow I think it missed the United Kingdom.”

  “No it didn’t. The whole world knows what an Oscar is.”

  “If you say so, I most certainly believe you.” Friend or no friend, Nydia recognized Bette Davis as a woman of formidable ambition and possessed of the necessary ruthlessness to realize that ambition. “Now, what’s a genuine Oscar as opposed to your everyday, run-of-the-mill Oscar?”

  “Did you see my performance as Mildred two years ago in Of Human Bondage?”

  “Absolutely brilliant!” And she meant it.

  Bette said heatedly, “I should have gotten an Oscar then. But no! I was done out of it! Jack Warner forced people to vote against me to keep me in line, to keep me in bad roles in bad pictures so he wouldn't have to pay me more money! And I’m indentured to him until 1942! Can you beat that? 1942!”

  “Fate can be so cruel.”

  “So Jack made me do Dangerous. I played an alcoholic actress based on the late Jeanne Eagels.”

  “I seem to have heard of her.”

  “She was quite good. She made a few films. She drank herself and drugged herself to death in 1929.”

  “That was a bad year for a lot of people.”

  “Christ, how I overacted that part. And for that piece of garbage they voted me an Oscar! The consolation prize!”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Bette. I'm sure you were quite good or you wouldn’t have been honored. Hollywood can’t be that foolish or hypercritical.”

  “Ha ha ha.”

  The mockery brought a smile to Nydia’s lips. It brought back the memory of her two weeks in Hollywood. She confided to Bette, “The seance I held for Marion Davies was also a mockery. She wanted me to reach the silent-screen director Thomas Ince, who, it was rumored, was shot to death by Hearst many years ago during a yachting trip. She wanted Ince to tell the truth, that it was a diseased ulcer that killed him.”