A Death in California Read online

  Talking was Hope’s strongest point. She loved to talk, and when she wasn’t talking, she loved to listen. It was in these compulsions that the contradictions of her life seemed summed up. She had discarded one husband because she considered him a boring stay-at-home, another because she considered him uninterested in children and domesticity. She wanted to spend time with her children, to befriend them, be involved with them, but she also wanted to have fun for herself, the kind of fun that her beauty and sparkle and personality made accessible. When Keith and Hope Elizabeth were old enough to understand, she promised them she’d never go out on a date two nights in a row, and she almost never did, but on the nights she did go out, she usually arranged two or three dates in one evening, two or three nightclubs in one evening, especially during a period when she and Phyllis were dating nightclub bouncers. Often she and Phyllis and their dates would end up at a Chinese restaurant on Sunset eating pea pods and partying until 4:00 A.M., when the place closed. Behaviors that were either expressed or implied in her upbringing had taken obvious hold—she could be naturally arrogant to a waiter in a restaurant, and often was—but other behavior came naturally, too. She was softhearted toward loners and troubled creatures; over the years she’d taken in dozens of stray cats and a handful of runaway children. A friend called Hope’s house “early Crash Pad.” If the waiter she treated imperiously had broken down and cried and told her his troubles, she’d have soothed him, advised him, and maybe taken him in, too. When one of her former maids turned up pregnant, Hope took her in, and when the baby was due, took her to the hospital. When the hospital said only a family member could go into the labor room, Hope signed the form in the space for FATHER.

  She may have been generous, even extravagant, with her emotions and her love because she herself felt such an intense need to be loved without qualms or qualification, simply for herself. She wanted to love a man in that same way, and when she met Bill Ashlock in December 1972, at a Christmas party, she felt almost right away that he was that man. She found him quiet but not boring, successful but not flashy. He seemed able to express his feelings for her as readily as she did hers for him. That ability meant a great deal to Hope. “People have such a hard time saying ‘I love you’ or ‘I appreciate you,’” Hope said. “That’s one area where I don’t suffer at all. I do tell them. If they’re just going across the street, I tell them! I always give the people I love lots of attention, lots of appreciation. I always try to let them know they’re important to me; then if something happens to either of you, you won’t have any regrets about anything left unsaid. I’m a big believer in, if you feel something good and positive about somebody, for God’s sake, tell them! Because you never know what’s going to happen. You never know what tomorrow’s going to bring.”

  At 10:30 that Friday morning, February 23, 1973, Hope’s new maid, Martha Padilla, knocked on the bedroom door and told Hope that Mr. Ashlock was calling and had asked Martha to wake Hope to talk to him.

  Hope came awake quickly. Bill called her every day from his office—usually they talked for at least an hour—and she’d expected his call today, but it was odd for him to call so early and ask that she be awakened. She half-sat up in bed and reached for the bedside phone, propping herself up on her right elbow.

  “Hi,” she said. “Bill?”

  “Hopie,” Bill said, “listen to this. You want to have the biggest laugh of your life?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Well, for some crazy reason, I’m going to be interviewed. A guy called me and said he’s doing a story for the L.A. Times on the ten most eligible bachelors in town, and he wants to interview me.”

  Hope laughed. “Tell him you’re not a bachelor.”

  Bill laughed too, then he sounded serious. “Hopie, the thing is, I don’t want to do this if it’s going to affect our relationship, where you’re going to think I’m interested in meeting other girls, because I’m not.”

  “I know you’re not,” Hope said.

  “And another thing,” Bill went on. “Do you think it could be a problem for you, with your divorce coming up or anything? Because if you think it could be a problem, I won’t do it.”

  “No, no,” Hope said. “That won’t be a problem. Go ahead, have your little ego trip and do it. It sounds like fun.”

  “Well, if you think it’s okay,” Bill said, “I’ll go ahead and do it. I’m supposed to meet him for lunch. And I’ll call you after lunch.”

  “Wait a minute,” Hope said. “I’ve got an idea.” She sat up straighter in bed and shifted the phone around, brushing her long hair back from her face. “Bill, maybe if you mention certain places when you talk to this guy, and they get printed in the story, maybe later we could get a free dinner at those places or something. I could find out from Tom what he thinks.”

  “Well, okay,” Bill said. “But find out right away, because the guy is coming over. I’m going to meet him at noon.”

  “I will,” Hope said. “I’ll call you right back.”

  Bill hung up, and Hope quickly dialed Tom Masters. Although she and Tom had been separated for two years, she saw him often, and they kept in touch by phone; she had called him just a few days earlier to tell him about one of Bill’s commercials being on a “ten-best” list. She had filed initial divorce papers on Tom only a few weeks before. Their marriage had been over for a long, long time, but she deliberately delayed filing.

  “I knew that would have been out of the frying pan into the fire,” Hope explained. “So I waited a long time, and didn’t file papers, because if I’d been divorced right away, someone might have come along and I might, in an emotional burst of enthusiasm, have gone off and gotten married again.” Even early in her marriage to Tom, several men had continued to call her, telling her they were waiting for her. Now that she felt her relationship with Bill Ashlock was sound and right and destined for marriage, she had finally filed papers on Tom.

  She had mixed feelings about Tom Masters. On the one hand, she considered him unsympathetic to people, not at all compassionate, even cold-blooded. “When I look in your eyes,” she had once told him, “no one’s home.” Although Keith and Hope Elizabeth had been only eight and ten years old when she married Tom, it was her feeling that he resented the time she spent with them, time when she could have been going out on the town with him, and he once suggested sending them to boarding school. Remembering her own misery at Westlake, especially the times when she’d boarded there while her mother was traveling abroad, Hope had instantly and firmly refused to consider it, and she and Tom had had a major battle. They’d fought about their own child, K.C., too, when Tom’s parents, who lived in Massachusetts, were flying to Las Vegas for a holiday. To save them coming the rest of the way to Los Angeles to see their grandson, Tom wanted to take K.C. and get a room at Caesar’s Palace, where his parents could play with K.C. between shows. When Hope declared that such a plan was ridiculous for a two-year-old, she and Tom had another big row. Hope didn’t like Las Vegas anyway. She’d gone there a couple of times with Tom, who liked the place and seemed to know a lot of people there.

  On the other hand, she had to admit that Tom was a pretty good father to K.C. Besides paying his $185 a month in child support faithfully, he paid for a lot of extras: K.C.’s jackets and shoes, haircuts, the dentist. Hope estimated the extras came to about $3,000 a year. Tom came by every Saturday to take K.C. someplace—if only to the car wash or to get a hamburger. He always brought him back Saturday evening. Tom played golf on Sundays, so he never took K.C. on Sunday. Besides his Saturday visits, Tom sometimes stopped in during the week to see K.C. and chat with Hope. That week, just a few days earlier, he’d come by after work and shared their bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, though he hadn’t stayed long because he’d said he had to meet a client for a drink at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Hope remembered it clearly because she knew Tom hated the Hilton and she’d never known him to go there, at least not for just a drink. Usually when he met someone after wor
k, he went to the Cock & Bull or to the Playboy Club, near his office, at the end of Sunset Strip. Once in a while, for someone special, he’d go to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the most celebrated bar in town, but never to the Beverly Hilton. “Why in the world are you going to the Hilton?” she remembered asking Tom. “You know it takes forever to park there.” She didn’t remember what Tom had replied, or whether he had replied at all.

  Although her marriage to Tom had been a disaster, Hope had often told him she wished him well, both in his personal life and in his business. She knew how important it was to Tom that he succeed in his work, which was a blend of the media business and show business, what Hope called, when she was feeling kindly toward Tom, “the image business,” and “flesh peddling,” when she was not. Even as a kid growing up in New England, Tom had been stagestruck. When Richard Burton came to a town nearby to film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tom, a teen-ager then, had worked for the movie company as, in Hope’s words, a “go-fer.” Richard Burton had given Tom a pair of boots and when Tom came to California after high school, to seek his fortune, he’d brought the boots with him.

  Tom was only twenty-four when he and Hope were married, but he’d been seeking that fortune most aggressively. He’d already changed his name, from Omasta to Masters, and now, at twenty-seven, he’d already set up his own P.R. firm. He still had a long way to go—he drove a five-year-old Chevy, and in 1972 he’d grossed only about twenty-five thousand dollars, which had to cover a lot of expenses, including office staff. For a while Hope’s friend Phyllis had worked for Tom part-time, three mornings a week. She found Tom demanding but not really difficult; when he saw what a good speller she was, he seemed surprised and pleased, and Phyllis never had any complaints about the way he treated her. She was a little surprised, too, because she and Hope had agreed that Tom was very cold, very macho, and Phyllis had not gotten along especially well with him outside the office. Phyllis and her boyfriend had sometimes gone with Hope and Tom to a restaurant or to a nightclub, and she was often annoyed because, she said, “you could be in the middle of your drink, or not even have put your fork down on your plate, and Tom would announce that it was time to leave.” She thought that maybe because they’d gone to these places free—as a press agent, Tom got a lot of passes—Tom must have felt he could call the shots, just as he tried to do at home. Phyllis had gone to dinner at Tom and Hope’s only once, and she recalled how, after dinner, when she and Hope were sitting in the living room talking, Tom had suddenly said, “I’m ready for bed. You can leave now.” Besides being resentful of her children by her first husband, Tom, in Hope’s view, had seemed antagonistic to Hope’s friends and had tried to arrange Hope’s life, which mostly meant staying home all day and going out with him all night. As much as she liked going out, Hope didn’t like Tom’s attitude. He told her what to wear and how to set her hair; he liked a lot of dramatic makeup. “I was simply a prop,” Hope decided. “He wanted a real flashy broad on his arm, so that’s what I was.”

  Still, she’d always felt that if she could help Tom get ahead in his struggling new business, she would. She had loaned him money from the thousand-dollar emergency fund she tried to keep on hand, because she knew he owed people money, and now, when she telephoned him, she told Tom that if the article about Bill mentioned a restaurant or a club that Tom was connected with, not only might she and Bill get a free meal but Tom might, in some way, get something out of it.

  Tom didn’t seem interested. “There’s very little publicity value in a story like this,” he said on the phone. “If the story is about ten guys, a lot of places will be mentioned—and anyway, it’s only a one-time thing.”

  Hope reminded him, then, that she was going away for the weekend with Bill and that Martha would be expecting Tom to pick up K.C. on Saturday morning and keep him all day. Tom said he remembered and hung up abruptly. Hope wasn’t taken aback; she’d always thought Tom to be basically cold to people, except to people who could do him some good. She thought maybe he was that way because of his business. “I think Tom doesn’t get emotionally involved,” she said, “because in his business there comes a time when the person he represents goes downhill and can’t make it anymore.”

  Besides, she thought Tom might have hung up rudely because she sensed he was jealous of Bill. Not because of Hope, but because of K.C., who was very fond of Bill. Before dinner, when Bill sat before the gas-jet fireplace with his customary gin and tonic, K.C. would sit either next to him or on his lap, with a glass of tonic and lime Bill fixed for him.

  Hope called Gary then, a lawyer who was a neighbor and a close friend. Gary had sometimes taken Hope out, not because they were romantically involved, but because he felt she should get out more, meet people, have fun. The night she’d met Bill at the Christmas party, she’d gone with Gary. About two months earlier, Hope had broken up with the man she’d been living with, a screenwriter named Lionel. Lionel had left town, and Hope had been sitting home alone, mostly, when Gary called to insist she go to the party with him. “This is ridiculous,” Gary told Hope. “Lionel’s been gone for two months, and it’s time you started circulating.” Hope had conceded she was lonely, so she’d gone to dinner with Gary at a place in Century City, then to a party at the Century House where the banquet room was set up with fifty small round tables and what seemed like hundreds of people sitting and standing around. Gary squeezed through the crush at the bar, got drinks, and found two places at a table with people he knew.

  “Then I looked up, and there were those eyes looking at me from way across the room,” Hope told Phyllis. “At first I thought it was Tom, because of the big dark eyes and the mustache, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be staring at me like that. I was a little drunk, I guess, acting kind of silly, so I pointed and said, ‘Look at that guy over there. I think that’s my ex-husband.’” Later, she told Phyllis, when she was out in the foyer, the man came up to her. “I want to apologize for staring at you,” he had said. “And I want to apologize for pointing at you,” Hope said. They both laughed. He told her his name—William Ashlock—and she told him hers. “I feel uncomfortable here,” he said. “I’m too old.” Hope laughed again. “I’m too old, Gary’s too old, we’re all too old,” she replied. Gary walked over then, and Hope introduced the men. Gary suggested they all go to another party he knew about, a smaller party at the Beverly Hilton, and they agreed to meet at the entrance to the Hilton party room, by some pillars. Bill drove his own car; Hope drove to the Hilton with Gary. “I think this guy is one of the nicest people we’ve met in a long time,” Gary said. “If he wants to drive you home, it’s okay, go ahead, let him drive you home.”

  “Bill was standing by the pillars, exactly where I’d told him to wait,” Hope told Phyllis, and almost right away they’d said good night to Gary and gone to a Roaring Twenties place in the hotel, where they had a drink and listened to the music. Then they wandered around the Hilton for a while, looking at the shops. When Bill drove Hope home, he came in for only a few minutes, but the next day he telephoned and said he’d like to come by after work. “Oh, my God,” Hope said, “the house is a disaster, I have no help, and anyway I can’t go out again tonight.” Bill said it didn’t matter about the house and that they didn’t have to go out, he’d bring a pizza.

  He came by with a large pizza and met the children, who seemed to take to him at once. He didn’t stay over that night—in fact, he and Hope didn’t sleep together until they’d known each other a month, when they went to Lake Arrowhead for a weekend, one of the two weekends they ever had together out of town. Even before that first weekend away, Bill had been moving in, piece by piece; he’d bring a sweater or a jacket and leave it, then his guitar. By the end of January he’d pretty much moved in altogether, and they were tentatively planning to be married in about six months, when the final divorce papers came through, in late spring or early summer.

  But Bill still kept his apartment on Lafayette Park Place downtown
, not far from his office. Once in a while he and Hope spent the night there, when they wanted to talk without the children running around. Just the previous Friday evening, after dinner, they’d gone to Bill’s place for the night. They’d been feeling a little reckless and had gone to the Brown Derby for dinner, which they couldn’t afford; it was already the middle of the month and, as usual, they’d had little money left. Martha Padilla was living in then, and although Hope didn’t like to leave K.C. with the new maid very long—Martha was only seventeen years old and inclined to spend much of the time with her boyfriend in his car, parked in Hope’s driveway—she’d assumed K.C. had gone to sleep by then, and she knew Tom would pick him up on Saturday. The older children would be all right with Martha, and would probably play around with friends in the neighborhood on Saturday. So Hope and Bill had gone back to his apartment, where she’d phoned Martha to say she wouldn’t be home till Saturday afternoon.

  Besides a cozy getaway spot for the two of them, Bill’s apartment was also a place for him to work. Often, at noon, instead of going out to lunch, he’d go to his apartment and compose music or write copy for television commercials. Bill had been creative supervisor at Dailey & Associates, an advertising agency, for three years. Many of his commercials and print ads had won awards, twenty-eight altogether, including the International Broadcasting Award and one from the American Advertising Federation. Recently, one of his ads had appeared on a “ten-best” list, the one Hope had called Tom about, an ad for Santa Anita Racetrack, with surging classical music in the background and a collage of morning shots—dogs waking up in the hayloft, horses stretching in their stalls and loping around the paddock, chefs in the kitchen smiling as they wielded glossy knives over piles of fresh vegetables and fruits. The narrator had only one simple line: “Today is our day at Santa Anita. Tomorrow may be your day.” But the first prize had gone to a competing ad, with the tag line “Try it, you’ll like it.”