If anything, he was exactly the opposite. Unconsciously he glanced at the closed door to Rina's bedroom. There had to be more to it than that, he thought.
It was four months before he saw Rina again.
He looked up from the couch in his uncle's office as she swept into the room.
"Rina, darling!" Bernie Norman said, getting up from his desk and throwing his arms around her enthusiastically.
The producer stepped back and looked at her, walking around her as if she were a prize heifer in a cattle show. "Slimmer and more beautiful than ever."
Rina looked over. "Hello, David," she said quietly.
"Hello, Rina." He got to his feet. "How are you?"
"I'm fine," she answered. "Who wouldn't be after three months on a health farm?" He laughed.
"And your next picture will be another vacation," Norman interrupted.
Rina turned back to him, a faint smile coming over her face. "Go ahead, you old bastard," she said. "Con me into it."
Norman laughed happily.
"For a minute, I was wondering if it was my old girl who was coming into the office, so nice she was!"
Rina laughed, too.
"What's the vacation?" she asked.
"Africa!" Norman said triumphantly. "The greatest jungle script I read since Trader Horn."
"I knew it," Rina said, turning to David. "I knew the next thing he'd have me do would be a female Tarzan!"
After she was gone, David looked across the room at his uncle.
"Rina seems quieter, more subdued, somehow."
Norman looked at him shrewdly. "So what?" he said. "Maybe she's growing up a bissel and settling down. It's about time." He got up from his desk and walked over to David. "Only six months we got to the stockholders' meeting next March."
"You still don't know who's selling us short?"
"No." Norman shook his head.
"I tried everyplace. The brokers, the underwriters, the banks. They tried. Nobody knows.
But every day, the stock goes down." He chewed on his unlit cigar. "I bought up every share I could but enough money I ain't got to stop it.
All the cash I could beg or borrow is gone."
"Maybe the stock will go up when we announce Rina's new picture.
Everyone knows she's a sure money-maker."
"I hope so," Norman said.
"Everywhere we're losing money. Even the theaters." He walked back to his chair and slumped down into it. "That was the mistake I made.
I should never have bought them.
For them I had to float the stock, borrow all that money from the banks.
Pictures I know; real estate, phooey!
I should never have listened to those chazairem on Wall Street, ten years ago.
Now I sold my company, the money I ain't got no more. And I don't even know who owns it!"
David got to his feet.
"Well, there's no use in worrying about it. There's still six months till the meeting. And a lot can happen in six months."
"Yeah," Norman said discouragingly. "It can get worse!"
David closed the door of his office behind him. He sat down at his desk and ran down the list of enemies his uncle had made in the course of his life.
It was a long list but there wasn't anyone who had the kind of money this operation required.
Besides, most of them were in the picture business and they had done as much to his uncle as he had done to them.
It was a kind of game among members of a club.
They screamed and hollered a lot but none ever took it seriously enough to carry a grudge like this.
Suddenly, he remembered something – Rina.
He glanced at the door, his hand going automatically to the telephone. He pulled his hand back sharply.
There was no sense in making a fool of himself. But he had a hunch.
How right he was he wasn't to know until he had Ilene sign Rina into the hospital under a phony name six months later. She was just back from Africa after shooting The Jungle Queen, and suddenly took very sick.
He hadn't wanted the press to find out until after the picture was released.
21.
"Jonas Cord," Norman said bitterly. "Jonas Cord it was the whole time.
Why didn't you tell me?"
David turned from the hotel window looking out over Central Park.