Читать книгу Playing Dead - Jessie Keane - Страница 16

Chapter 10

1950

Mud sticks. Oh, so true. Rick knew it. The first thing he’d done when he’d found Viv’s body was to phone the studio, tell them. They would know what to do; they would help him.

Only, they didn’t. He couldn’t get hold of anyone.

As he was going apeshit trying to figure out what to do, Frances came into the lounge and said, ‘I phoned.’

Rick stopped his anxious pacing and stared at the boy. ‘. . . You what?’

‘The ambulance. I phoned.’

Oh shit.

He could see it all caving in on him. Could see it all hitting the fan.

He phoned the only one he could truly count on. He phoned LaLa.

‘Rick? What the fuck? It’s four o’clock in the morning.’

‘LaLa. You’ve got to help me. Viv’s dead.’

‘She’s what?’

Rick was standing in the hall. ‘She’s dead,’ he said again. LaLa would help. She would know what to do. ‘Looks like she slipped or something getting in the tub. Cut her head open. Either that or one of her drinking cronies whacked her. Either way, she’s dead.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh? Is that all you can say? LaLa, the woman’s dead . . . Shit a brick . . .’

The ambulance was pulling up, and the police. Frances opened the door to them.

‘Oh dear. Are the police there?’ asked Lala.

Then the press were crowding into the hallway, flashbulbs were popping in his face.

‘Yeah. And the press. Some bastard must have tipped them off.’

LaLa hung up.

‘LaLa? Hello?’ He redialled, but she didn’t answer. Anyway, the police wanted to talk with him . . .

Within days – hellish long days when the press camped outside, trapping him inside his own home with nobody but Frances for company – the studio heads wrote and very politely told him that he should consider his contract terminated, with immediate effect.

He phoned LaLa, but her secretary said she was in a meeting.

The day after the studio heads dumped him, LaLa dumped him too.

The papers came, and he flinched at the headlines.

‘Secret wife of dashing movie star Rick Ducane in suicide drama’, they shrieked.

‘Mystery death of Mrs Rick Ducane.’

‘Did he do it?’ Beneath that one, there was a picture of him standing in his hallway, white-faced with shock, holding up a hand to fend off not only the photographers but also disaster. But he couldn’t stop this.

Vivienne had killed him. Killed his career, killed his life.

The police questioned him endlessly, but his alibi was watertight. They hauled in a couple of her drinking buddies and questioned them, too, but nothing stuck. Finally, they seemed to be satisfied that Viv’s death was nothing but a tragic accident.

Within a month he fled back to England with Frances, and he never acted again.