Read I Confess for Free Online Page A

then—^ready, aim, fire! Precise, cool, with her madonna smile. I must have been a dreadful disappointment to her. She had put so much faith in me.
    I let the New Yorker drop to the floor and thought about Margaret. I met her in 1940. She was one of the innumerable girls that people Hollywood and look exactly alike—^long legs, beautiful bodies, pretty faces. Ambitious and penniless. Always waiting for their chance. You can find them at every cocktail party, in every night club. Sometimes steered by a friend (male) into something like the proximity of an actual production, sometimes even visible on the screen as supers; persevering, holding their

    liquor, and with nothing on their minds but a career. I met her at a party Bette Davis was giving. Jerry Wald had her in tow. She looked great, danced well, and I flirted with her. At the time I was the fifth writer working on a crime story for Charles Laughton. She knew about it. We drank a lot and I took her home with me. I had a small apartment in Beverly Hills. She was young, beautiful, and smelled of Palmolive soap, Chanel #5 and Pepsodent. I was pretty drunk, and as far as I could make out, she was very passionate. She said she had been in love with me for a long time and raved about my work. By the time she had got out of her clothes and into bed with me, she was trembling from head to foot and stammering that I must certainly be thinking she was doing all this to get a part, but that wasn't so. She was doing this because she loved me, because she couldn't help it, because I could do with her whatever I wanted. It made a deep impression on me.
    Next day she moved in with me, and the day after that I mentioned her to Irving Wallace, our producer. He gave her an audition, they ran a pilot, and she got a small part. Laughton was very nice to her. But none of it helped. She was so woefully untalented that in the end her scenes were cut—in the interest of the picture and on orders from above—to an absolute minimum.
    She was brave about it, said she'd warned me that she had really never felt she was an actress. On the day of the first preview, she told me something else. She smiled and cuddled up to me. We were sitting fairly far back in the projection room, and she. waited until we were watching the screen. Then she told me she'd been to a doctor, and there was no doubt about it—she was pregnant.

    "Am I disturbing?" It was Joe Clayton. I hadn't heard him knock and he was already in the room, a few illustrated weeklies and a bottle of scotch in his hands.
    "Of course not," I said. "Come on in, Joe."
    He laughed boisterously and shook my hand vigorously. He looked like a jolly, fat stockbroker.
    "First let's have a drink," he said, and rang for the nurse. Then he sat down and opened the bottle with a pocket-knife that included a corkscrew. He took a cigar case out of his pocket. "May I?"
    "Sure."
    He lit a monstrous cigar and blew huge clouds of smoke into the room. He seemed very pleased with himself.
    "You seem very pleased with yourself, Joe," I said. For a reason I couldn't define, I didn't feel right about it. Something was wrong. I couldn't say what, but I felt it unmistakably. He was in just too good spirits.
    "I am, I am, my boy." He beamed at me as he folded his short, thick fingers. ''The Cry in the Dark is sold. A month from now we start shooting in the studio." Cry in the Dark was my film. His joviahty made me feel increasingly uneasy.
    "What do you mean, in four weeks?" I asked. "You've only got my first draft."
    "Your first draft's great, Jimmy!" He slapped me on the back. "Couldn't be better. I mean it. Evepybody's crazy about it, even Taschenstadt. And you know what it means if he's crazy about anything."

    "Yes, yes," I said, "but it's still only a first draft. Hell-weg and I were going to change a few scenes, and then • . ." I interrupted myself. "Just a minute . . . Taschen-stadt doesn't speak a word of English."
    "I know. Why?"
    "So how could he read