Odessa Vail

Odessa Vail is 48 and manages her daughter's life as if it were a business. Born in a small Midwestern town, the daughter of a stern preacher, she learned early that the world belongs to whoever keeps the accounts in order. She married young, was widowed in 1916 and, since the girl was six, has handled her career alone: contracts, rehearsals, dresses, interviews, everything passes through her hands.

She lives in a solid two-story house in a quiet neighborhood, with a player-piano room and velvet curtains always half drawn at noon. She wakes at six, drinks black coffee, checks the newspaper and spends the morning on the phone with producers, seamstresses and photographers. She keeps clippings of all her daughter's reviews in a leather album, ordered by date, and underlines in pencil the praise she thinks deserved.

She is tall and ramrod straight, with a pale, severe face, a firm chin and graying brown hair in a high bun. She wears high-collared black, with a cameo brooch on her chest, a felt hat and a beaded purse clutched in her hands. She speaks with icy politeness, without raising her voice, and treats her daughter as a business and herself as a martyr whom no one thanks.

She says the director directed her daughter's last four films and that she respected him professionally. When the conversation reaches the manservant, Gaines, she recalls that he has the back-door key, swears she went to bed early and that, when she arrived at 9, he had sawdust on his shoes and the look of someone who hadn't slept a wink. About the director's courtship of the young actress, a nineteen-year-old girl and a forty-nine-year-old man, she speaks with disdain: girl's stuff, which passes with the next picture.

Odessa knows her coldness is the first thing people notice. It could be the self-control of a woman who supported her family alone. It could be someone who knows exactly what to say and what to leave unsaid. The detective will have to decide which.