Page 62 of His Girl Hollywood
“I told ya, lady, he wasn’t with me.” Eleanor enunciated each word very slowly.
“No, that’s not—” Arlene bit her lip and mentally counted to ten. Out of all the things she’d imagined Don was keeping from her, the fact he was in thrall to a gangster manager was not one of them. That discovery alone would’ve pushed her to the edge, so Eleanor’s presence on top of it all was straining her nerves to their breaking point. She was struggling to make sense of this new information and how it colored everything Don had told her since he’d come back. But blowing up at this dizzy dame was not going to help Don.“It’s obvious now I was wrong. I’m sorry. But if Frankie got ahold of Don, what could he have done with him?”
Eleanor took on a thoughtful look, worrying her lip and looking up, as if the answer could be found in Lena’s mother’s cracked and worn ceiling. “No idea. The last time I talked to Frankie, he was going on and on about how if Don didn’t get in line, he was gonna be sure to remind him ‘where he came from.’ A reminder to Don that he was nothin’ without him. That’s why I came here. I thought you might know what he meant by that.”
Arlene leaned her elbows on the table and placed her head in her hands, rubbing her temples with her fingers. She was exhausted, worn out by the day’s poisonous cocktail of anxiety and adrenaline. Learning that her leading man had possibly been kidnapped didn’t exactly do anything to ameliorate that.
She wanted to scream. She’d known Don was keeping something from her, but this? This was something that had the power to endanger them all. Her life, the picture, her mother, anything Don touched could have ended up in this man’s crosshairs. But the more she pondered it, the more her anger was replaced by worry. She’d been so quick to judge Don, to assume the worst, to believe that he’d lied to her—when all along he’d been in terrible trouble. Trouble that he’d tried to protect them all from by keeping the truth from her. It was stupid and misguided, but it was noble too. Something the boy she’d known and loved would’ve done. She shoved a sense of gnawing guilt away. There wasn’t time for shame or anger right now. They had to find him.
“He’s from here,” muttered Arlene, trying to piece together puzzle pieces in her brain that didn’t quite fit together. “This is the street and the house where he grew up. And I haven’t seen anything remotely resembling a gangster or goon squad today. Granted, I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
“Nah, Frankie wouldn’t have brought him here. He would’ve wanted to scare him, make him uncomfortable.”
Arlene racked her brain. San Pedro was a family town, but it had always had a seedier element. There were at least a dozen places Frankie could’ve taken Don. There was the back room at the bar on 17th Street. No, that would draw too much notice. You couldn’t turn around in there without bumping into at least four regulars who seemingly lived there. The cliffs at Point Fermin? Too exposed. And if Don was there, he was probably at the bottom of them, which Arlene didn’t want to think about. “‘Where he came from’… What did Frankie mean by that?”
“That’s what I hoped you could tell me,” Eleanor replied, not a hint of irony about her. Arlene followed Eleanor’s eyes around the room as they took in the family photos hanging on the walls. “What about Don’s parents?”
“No, they’re been dead over a year,” answered Arlene. “Besides, there was no love lost between Don and his parents. Is it possible we’re overreacting and he stayed out all night to clear his head?”
Eleanor chewed at her bottom lip. “Anything’s possible. But I found Eddie Rosso passed out in his bed at the hotel this morning. He was barely coherent, nursing a bad hangover. I’ve seen that kinda hangover before. It wasn’t just alcohol he drank last night. Someone slipped him a Mickey. I’d bet my left foot that the dame I left Eddie with at the Frolic Room works for Frankie, and that she put something in his drink. Eddie’s rug was stained with droplets of blood. But he doesn’t have a scratch on him, so it had to belong to someone else.”
Eleanor set her black handbag on the table and opened the pearl-inlaid clasp, fishing around inside it for something. She pulled out a long, black piece of material. “Someone left this in Eddie’s room. It’d been shoved under the bed.”
She handed it to Arlene, and Arlene ran the smooth silkymaterial through her fingers. She stopped when she reached a stain in the middle. “This is Don’s tie. He was wearing it last night.”
“How can you tell?”
“See this?” Arlene held out the stained section to Eleanor. “That’s a stain you made last night. Your lipstick or something.”
“Oh, that. That’s my snot,” Eleanor declared as if that was a perfectly normal thing to have left on a man’s tie.
Arlene dropped the tie distastefully and shot Eleanor a look of disgust. “Nevertheless, this is Don’s. I’m certain of it. Did you find anything else in Eddie’s room?”
Eleanor nodded. “Someone left a message in the rug.”
Arlene’s eyebrows shot to her hairline. “You didn’t think you should lead with that?”
“Listen, if you’re gonna criticize me, I’ll show myself out.”
Arlene balled her hand into a fist and resisted the urge to tell Eleanor to be her guest. “Sorry, Miss Lester. I’m worried, that’s all.”
Eleanor gave her a pitying look and clicked her tongue. “Gosh, you really got it bad.”
Arlene chose to ignore the comment. “The message in the rug. What did it say?”
“It said…” Eleanor squinted, like she was trying to remember a complicated solution to a math problem. “It said D-A-D-C and then had half a circle next to the C.”
Arlene stood to get pencil and paper from the counter in the kitchen and wrote down the letters Eleanor had listed. It didn’t make any sense. Was it supposed to be a code of some sort? She chewed on the end of the pencil and pondered various combinations of the letters. Was it an anagram? No.
“There was also a symbol above the letters,” Eleanor interjected.
Arlene pushed the paper and pencil at her across the table. “Can you draw it?”
Eleanor eyed the pencil with a look of disgust. “You gotta ’nother pencil? You just had that in your mouth.”
“And I had my fingers all over your snot stains. Draw it.”
Eleanor squeaked in surprise and hurriedly snatched up the pencil, drawing a shape with an oval and a triangle beneath it. She slid it back across the table to Arlene. It looked a bit like a rocket ship. Arlene placed her elbows on the table and rested her head against her fists, staring at the drawing as if its meaning would suddenly reveal itself to her. “Space, the moon, rocket fuel? None of those mean anything.” She huffed. “What was he trying to tell us?”