Free An Inconvenient Woman by Dominick Dunne Page A

to this wonderful man last night, Pauline,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d have done without him.”
    Camilla and Philip looked at each other.
    “I’ll call you,” he said.
    As Philip was driving out of the courtyard, Jules Mendelson came up the driveway in his dark blue Bentley. He stopped the car by the front door and got out. Walking over to where Pauline and Camilla were standing, he put his arms around Camilla and hugged her. To Philip, leaving, he appeared weary.
    When Philip Quennell told Jules Mendelson the night before, after refusing his Château Margaux wine from the Bresciani auction, that he did not have anything so dramatic as a drinking problem—“simply no taste for it”—he was not telling the truth, but it was an untruth with which he had long since come to terms. There had been in his past a problem, one with dire consequences, and as a result part of his life, a part that he never discussed with anyone, was spent in atonement. Twice each year he returned to the small town in Connecticut where he was born. He was the son of the town doctor, long dead, and had gone to good schools on scholarships. Across the causeway that separated Old Saybrook from Winthrop Point, an enclave for wealthy summer residents from Hartford and New Haven, was Sophie Bushnell, who had lived her life in a wheelchair since the accident that crippled her.
    At seven o’clock on the morning following Hector Paradiso’s death, Philip was seated in a small hall on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, reading the
Los Angeles Tribunal
and drinking coffee from a cardboard container while waiting for the AA meeting to start. He tore through the paper looking for news of the violent event in which he had become involved. It surprised him that it was not mentioned on the first page, or in the first section. It surprised himmore that it was not mentioned in the section known as the Metro section, which covered local news. Finally, on the obituary page, he found it in an inconspicuous position, quite easily missable, a small announcement of the death of Hector Paradiso. He folded the paper in half and then refolded it in quarters in order to read the item again to see if it bore some clue.
    “Something fishy there,” said a girl on a chair next to him, who was reading his newspaper over his shoulder.
    “Hmmm?” said Philip.
    The girl, who smelled of expensive bath oil and perfume, tapped a beautifully manicured fingernail on the story of Hector Paradiso’s death.
    “I said there’s something fishy about that story,” she repeated.
    Philip turned to look at her. She was young and very pretty, with dark red hair and vividly blue eyes that met his with a look that hovered between flirtatious and humorous. Although she was fashionably dressed, her manner, her voice, and her way of sitting were at odds with her expensive clothes. She exuded sensuality rather than fashionableness and seemed to Philip a curious but dazzling presence at such an early hour in the drab surroundings of an AA meeting on Robertson Boulevard.
    “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.
    “Want to know how I see it?” she asked.
    “Sure.”
    “He went to Pauline Mendelson’s party, right?”
    “How do you know that?”
    “He always goes to Pauline Mendelson’s parties. He was her pet. You know how all those society ladies have their pets?”
    Philip smiled. He liked her. “But how do you even know Pauline Mendelson had a party?”
    “I read it in Cyril Rathbone’s column in
Mulholland
,” she answered, shrugging. “I always read the society columns.”
    “Go on.”
    “In my scenario, on the way home he stops at Miss Garbo’s.”
    “What’s Miss Garbo’s?”
    “You new in town, or something?”
    “I am. Yes.”
    “It’s a bar, with a cabaret. It’s a place where well-to-dogentlemen of a certain persuasion go on their way home from fashionable places, like a Pauline Mendelson party, if you get my drift.”
    Philip, nodding,