Swimming to Catalina

drink and finishing it off.
    “You know more than I do,” Stone said. “If you’ll tell me what you know, maybe it will be enough to help me get Vance out of this.”
    She stared off into the middle distance.
    “Start at the beginning,” he said.
    “I’ve always done what Vance wanted,” she said. “How do I know that what you want me to do is the right thing?”
    “You’ll have to take my word for it.”
    “I don’t know if I can do that.”
    “The alternative is for me to involve the police and the FBI and for the gossip mills to get hold of it.”
    “You wouldn’t do that,” she said.
    “Wouldn’t I? Unless you help me, I won’t have a choice. My nose is pressed against a brick wall, and I have nowhere to go. If I don’t do something, Vance is going to get Arrington killed, and I can’t allow that to happen. I hope you understand my position.”
    “If I tell you what I know, will you promise not to go to the police, the FBI, or the press?”
    “No. I’ll do whatever I think is the best thing for Arrington. You might consider that that might be the best thing for Vance, too.”
    “If there’s a way to help her without making this public, will you do that?”
    “Yes. But I’ll be the judge of how to proceed.”
    “Vance is a very brave man, you know. You might not know him well enough to know that.”
    “He may well be a brave man,” Stone said, “but he’s also a very foolish one.”
    “All that stuff I spouted about movie stars and how they behave—it’s true, of course, but not of Vance.”

    “Isn’t it? Isn’t he jeopardizing Arrington’s life in order to protect his career?”
    “I honestly don’t think he is.”
    “Then what is he trying to do?”
    “I think he thinks he can beat them at their own game.”
    “Oh, Jesus,” Stone moaned. “Not that.”
    She nodded. “He figures this is between him and them, and he doesn’t really want any outside help.”
    “Then why did he ask me to come out here?”
    “He panicked, for just a moment. By the time you got here he had gotten hold of himself again.”
    “Exactly what is he trying to do?”
    “Save Arrington, save Lou Regenstein, save Centurion Studios. For a start.”
    “What else?”
    “I think he would very much like to kill Onofrio Ippolito.”
    “That makes two of us,” Stone muttered.
    “You’re too smart to do something like that, Stone, but Vance isn’t. Vance would kill him in a minute, if e could figure out how to do it without harming Arrington.”
    “That’s about all that’s kept me from killing him,” Stone said.
    “I hope you can help Vance. He’s a fine man, and I’d hate to see him pulled down by his own anger.”
    “Betty, if I’m going to help him, you’re going to have to help me.”
    A long pause. “All right,” she said at last.
    “Start at the beginning,” he said.
    And she did.

44
    Betty started slowly, reluctantly. “I guess it was a couple of weeks ago, maybe a little more. Vance came into work, and he was nervous. Vance is never nervous. He has this glacial calm about him; I think it’s one of the things that makes him come over so well on screen. The only other actor I’ve ever seen with that kind of calm was Alan Ladd.”
    Stone didn’t interrupt.
    “But he was nervous that day—anxious, angry, nearly shaking with it. I’d never seen anything like it from him. I didn’t ask what was wrong; I knew he’d never tell me. Instead, I just watched and waited, to see if I could figure it out. He made a lot of phone calls that morning, and he dialed them himself, instead of asking me to get somebody on the line, as he usually did. Some of the calls were in-studio; I could tell that because the studio lines are separate from the outside lines. And then he did something odd: he asked me to get his Centurion stock certificates from the big safe.

    “We have two safes in the office—a small fire safe that’s mostly for important documents and computer disks, and then the big safe that’s half as tall as I am. He keeps cash in there, along with some gold bars and some treasury bills. I think there’s a part of Vance that’s deeply insecure, that’s always ready to bolt. I think he has this fantasy of packing a briefcase, getting on a plane, and disappearing. Maybe it’s something in his past, I don’t know.
    “Anyway, he asked me to get the Centurion certificates. Vance owns about twelve percent of the studio, and Lou Regenstein owns around thirty