Free The Blonde by Anna Godbersen Page B

morphing into irony in his washed-out eyes. “Honey, I want to fuck something that doesn’t move. Something with big, trusting eyes, something stupid enough to believe I’m going to make their dreams come true. We’ll find a nice piece for you, too, all right?”
    Her mother really had kept a photograph on her bedside table, a publicity shot of Clark Gable from his early years, and though she had always known he was just a man from the pictures, she felt a swallowing disappointment that the performance of the late afternoon—of mother and father and boy and girl eating meat loaf for dinner while the sun was still up—wasn’t true. Her eyes lowered, and she brought the whiskey to her mouth.
    “Anyway,” he went on with gritty charm, “what if you really were my daughter? We’d have a Greek tragedy on our hands.”
    “All right.” She raised her gaze to meet his, and when she saw his grin she knew this was better. They were the same, like he said, had probably even once upon a time sucked some of the same cocks. She tossed her hair away from her face and told herself to feel careless until carelessness was radiating through her skin. “Let’s go. But where to?”
    “Mosey Moses is having a party.”
    Marilyn’s eyes got wide, and she rotated her head right and left.
    “You don’t know Mosey? Well.” Clark winked before standing and offering her his hand. They were moving quickly, through the foyer, and outside, where she saw the night sky white with stars. “You have been gone a long time. Nowadays everybody goes to Mosey’s.”

SEVEN
    Beverly Hills, April 1959
    “DOUGIE!”
    At the sound of the diminutive, trilled by his mother, Walls shrank slightly into the lounge chair upon which he had been hiding. It amazed him anew that at this late stage of life, when he was almost entirely emancipated, financially and personally speaking, and when he was, additionally, highly trained in the use of firearms and in a variety of surveillance techniques, his mother’s voice should still inject him with such an instant dose of migrainous agony. But he knew that she would find him sooner or later, so he sat up faithfully and allowed her to spot him.
    “Yes?”
    The tiki torches that had been lit earlier by the Moseses’ live-in help waved in the wind, illuminating the figure of his mother, paused on the highest of three long, curving marble steps that led up to the house. She was unspeakably thin, and wearing a tight black top that was cut away to reveal the entirety of her shoulders as well as a good deal of chest, and a full-length black lace skirt, as though she were some sort of Spanish dancer. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her face, and collected above the nape of her neck in a shape reminiscent of an especially large morning bun. Happily for the mood of her party, several guests had already made a big show of acting shocked that she was old enough to have a son of twenty-five.
    “Dougie . ” She lowered her chin and approached along the edge of the turquoise swimming pool, reminding him for perhaps the ten thousandthtime that she was a woman who had taken the advanced class in how to walk. “What are you doing out here? Everyone’s gone inside.”
    “Have they?” he asked, as though that had not been his chief motivation in remaining by the pool.
    She sat down next to him. “The temperature drops maybe twenty degrees at night here. You didn’t know that, did you?”
    “When I came outside it was still warm,” he replied irrelevantly.
    “That’s because it’s the desert, darling.” She laughed the twinkling laugh that might, to strangers, sound unaffected. “Don’t be fooled by all the trucked-in greenery.”
    She leaned back on her arm, a kind of Harper’s Bazaar pose, and closed her eyes and inhaled what Walls had to admit—regretfully, and only to himself—was wonderful-smelling night air.
    “I’m so glad you’ve finally decided to come home,” she said and sighed. But the