“Zolanda was thrilled,” Vera said. “I told her that the director had left the theater looking for a phone. He wanted to call his secretary immediately and tell her to make an appointment for a screen test for the psychic to the stars.”
“Zolanda believed every word you said because she wanted to believe that she was going to become a star.”
“We grew up in the same small town. We traveled to Hollywood on the same train. We stayed in the same shabby boardinghouses while we tried to get those first screen tests. I made it but Zolanda didn’t. Yes, I was offering her the one thing she craved more than anything else in the world.”
“She was jealous of you.”
“You could say insanely jealous.” Vera’s eyes were bleak. “But it took me a while to realize that. As I told you, she was a good actress. I’ll give her that much. She just didn’t have the look the directors want. I knew she was making money with her psychic routine. I thought she was content. I never understood the depths of her hatred and jealousy until the night she took me to the Rushbrook Sanitarium and handed me over to those two monsters, Gill and Paxton.”
“The paperwork says you signed the voluntary commitment papers.”
“I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Vera said. “The gossip magazines had declared me the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. Thanks to Dark Road I was an overnight star. I should have been on top of the world. I had everything I could want, but I was more depressed and anxious than I had ever been in my life. I was contemplating suicide.”
“But you didn’t want the studio to know.”
“I didn’t dare let them think that I was mentally unstable. I couldn’t see a doctor in Los Angeles, let alone check myself into a hospital for treatment. There are no secrets in that town. So I called the woman I believed was still my best friend from the old days, the one person I thought I could trust.”
“You called Zolanda.”
“She picked me up at my home and drove me all the way to Rushbrook.”
“She knew all about the Rushbrook Sanitarium because she was dealing drugs for Paxton and Gill,” Adelaide said.
“Yes, but at the time I didn’t know about the drug connection. When we got to Rushbrook, that bastard, Gill, was waiting for us. I was admitted under an assumed name. At the time I really believed that Zolanda was doing me a great favor. Gill gave me an injection, a strong sedative. I woke up in a room at the end of a long hall on ward five.”
“That’s almost exactly how I got to ward five, except that it was my fake husband who had me committed.”
“I still remember the screams at night,” Vera said.
“So do I. Nights were always the worst.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Eventually, Vera continued with her story.
“I’m not sure what they had in mind when I first arrived, but it didn’t take long for Gill and Ormsby to decide that I was an ideal test subject for Daydream. I wasn’t insane like the others on that floor,” she said.
“That’s how you became Patient A.”
“Gill planned to sell the drug to anyone who could pay the price for it. But Paxton had even greater ambitions. He hoped to use the drug to control powerful people—wealthy industrialists, senators, maybe the president.”
“Talk about hallucinating.”
“They weren’t altogether wrong about the drug, were they?” Vera said. “It does work as they thought, at least to some extent. In addition to being a strong hallucinogen, it makes a person susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. How do you think I got Zolanda up on that roof?”
“Did you push her off the parapet?”
“No,” Vera said. “There was no need to go that far. She started seeing things in the darkness. She panicked and fell. But in the end I made certain that she understood exactly why I was there.”
“What about the others? Ormsby, Leggett, Gill. Even Paxton is dead now. They went down like dominoes. In the end the entire drug ring was destroyed. That was not a coincidence, was it? You wanted revenge on all of them. You succeeded in destroying them.”
“I admit I owe you and Jake Truett for Paxton’s death. I had other plans for him but you took care of that problem for me. As for Ormsby, Gill, and Leggett, it wasn’t hard to convince Paxton that he didn’t need any of them. He was so sure that I wasn’t very bright. He was also convinced that the Daydream had left my nerves in a very fragile state. I let him think that I needed him in order to survive the stress of Hollywood.”
“He believed you.”
“Yes.
“Paxton was convinced that he was controlling you,” Adelaide said. “He never realized that you were manipulating him.”
“He was only too happy to get rid of the others. He had his own grand plans for Daydream.”
“I know what happened to Ormsby,” Adelaide said. “Tell me about Thelma Leggett.”
“Leggett called me after she went into hiding. She told me that she had my Rushbrook records. She said she would release them to the press if I didn’t pay blackmail. I agreed. She ordered me to leave the first payment in an amusement park in a small town on the coast.” Vera gave an elegant shrug. “I sent Paxton, instead.”
“You knew he would probably kill her.”
“Yes, of course. I also knew that he would grab the stash of blackmail materials, including my records. But I knew he would keep quiet because he had as much to lose as I did if those records hit the headlines.”
“I assume it was also Paxton who talked Gill into drugging Conrad Massey and sending him to that pier to murder Jake,” Adelaide said. “Massey was supposed to shoot Jake and then use the gun on himself.”
“That was the plan. But I knew it would probably go badly for Massey and Gill.”
“Because the drug is inherently unpredictable?”
Vera smiled. “And because I had a hunch that Jake Truett was too smart to get himself killed at a late-night rendezvous with a drug-crazed man.”
“You were right,” Adelaide said. “But why did Paxton want to murder Conrad Massey?”
“Massey didn’t know much about Daydream but he knew enough to be dangerous. He could be counted on to keep quiet as long as he had control of your inheritance. But it had become clear that he had lost you to Truett, and that meant he would soon lose your money. That made Paxton very nervous. He became frantic when he found out that Massey had survived the meeting with Truett. He knew that if Massey pointed the cops at Gill, Gill would, in turn, point them at Dr. Paxton, diet doctor to the stars.”
“So Paxton got rid of Gill that same night.”
“And then he joined me at the Paradise,” Vera said. “He wanted to establish an alibi in case he needed one. After he left the Paradise I went back to my villa. I assumed Paxton had gone back to the Burning Cove Hotel. But I got an uneasy feeling early this morning. I telephoned his villa at the hotel. When there was no answer, I suspected that he was up to something. I was worried that he had gone after you again.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried calling you here. When neither you nor Truett answered, I did the only thing I could think of—I telephoned the Paradise Club. Luther Pell was not there but whoever answered the phone said he would get a message to him.”
“That explains why Luther telephoned the Rushbrook police early this morning,” Adelaide said.
“I know it probably doesn’t matter to you, but I never wanted you to get killed. I didn’t know that Paxton intended to murder you the same night he killed Ormsby at Rushbrook. I didn’t realize at first that you were the reason Paxton and Zolanda and Thelma Leggett had all made the sudden decision to travel to Burning Cove. But I realized that the location offered a perfect opportunity for me to set my plans in motion. You may not believe it, but I didn’t even know that you were Patient B, let alone that you had escaped Rushbrook—not until the morning after Zolanda jumped off that roof.”