Hollywood Gothic (7 page)

“Have you got time for a cup of coffee, Jeff?”

Challis thought: For God’s sake, don’t overdo it.

“I’d love one, Morg, you know me, I run on the stuff … but we got a bunch of parents waiting down at the bottom of the mountain to see these kids. Give me a rain check.”

“You got it.”

“You know, it’s amazing,” the sheriff said, “the way these kids got through alone. Their leader, poor bastard, wandered into town last night, half-frozen … he’s in the hospital right now.” He shook his head. The bedroom door was ajar and Challis saw them standing at the foot of the stairs. The kids began piling out of the house. The sheriff watched them go, lingered. “You know, Morg, they could have run across that plane crash, the same general idea … I don’t suppose they mentioned anything about it?”

“Are you kidding? I’d have noticed anything like that—have they found the crash site yet? Good God, talk about irony—going to prison for life and you get killed in a plane crash. Makes you wonder.”

“They haven’t found it yet, but they will. Roads are still blocked, but now while it’s clear they’ll get the choppers in there, they’ll find it.”

“How are the roads from here on down? I’d like to get back to civilization today or tomorrow.”

“Now, that’s what I can’t understand, what’s so all-fired wonderful about civilization? And what’s so civilized about LA, anyway?”

“Jeffrey …” she said in a warning tone.

“Right. Well, there are some snow and mud slides, but tomorrow it ought to be smooth sailing. Unless we get more storms. Terrible weather—Malibu’s really catching it. Keep your radio on. Or give us a ring in Cresta, just to make sure …”

They went outside, and Challis went back to the window. So no one was looking for him yet. And even when the wreckage was found, there would be time spent searching through the mountain forests for him, or his body. The sheriff stood by the van chatting for another moment, then made sure all the kids were accounted for, and squeezed himself in. Ralph was sitting by the window in front, waving to Morgan as they drove away. Challis watched the receding automobile, its red light flashing cheerily on top, until it was gone around the distant curve of trees.

After a late-morning brunch of eggs scrambled with shrimp, tomatoes, celery, and curry powder, they settled down in the sunken living room. The wind had risen, and even the whipsawing sound of it made him cold. He built a fire and she put a tape on the Tandberg deck. Frank Sinatra was singing “I Cover the Waterfront” and Challis thought of the first time he’d heard the recording, a long time ago, a college boy who could never have dreamed what lay ahead.

“Tell me the whole story,” she said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor before the fire, leaning against the couch. “Maybe we’ll think of what you should be doing … and maybe not.” Her face seemed to say that she’d already given it some thought and drawn a blank.

“The day Goldie was murdered,” he said, as if giving the title of his oral report. The sound of his voice was familiar, going over the same ground.

“I had an apartment in West Los Angeles where I’d been living since moving out of the Malibu house. I’m not complaining, it was a nice apartment, big palm trees outside the window of the room I wrote in. I could see Century City, and Westwood and Beverly Hills were two minutes away. … I was sitting at my desk, it was just before noon, and the fog hadn’t burned off yet. I was looking out the window, waiting for those triangular Century City towers to take shape through the fog, and the telephone rang. I was expecting a call from my agent about a screenplay deal that had been perking for about three months, fifty grand up front, and it was important to me. I’d already had three calls from other guys, an actor and a writer, and all they wanted to talk about was Joe Namath’s knees, could he take the Rams to the Super Bowl. … I couldn’t think of anything to say about Joe Namath’s knees. Another guy called to ask me if I’d heard about the fella who was half-black and half-Japanese. I said no. He said every December seventh the fella attacks Pearl Bailey. That was the kind of morning it had been, the phone rings, and I pick it up thinking about the fifty grand …

“Well, it was Goldie. She was sitting on the deck at Malibu, I could hear the surf in the background. She was kind of up, you knew the adrenaline was going, pumping hard. She wouldn’t just chat, she was too high, she couldn’t slow things down and get her attention span under control, but the point was, she wanted me to come out and have dinner with her that evening.”

“Was that usual?” Morgan asked. “Did you still see much of her?”

“That’s just it, it wasn’t usual at all. We tended to be pretty self-conscious with each other … things had gotten pretty bad between us. So I hadn’t been back out to the beach house since I’d left. I asked her why, what was the big deal. She said—and this is a quote, so far as I can trust my memory—‘I need your advice, Toby. This time I’m going to fix the bastard once and for all.’ Unquote. I didn’t even ask her who she meant, because I assumed she was referring to her father, Aaron Roth. She always called him ‘the bastard’ in the same tone of voice, pure venom out of an old Spider Woman movie. She always spoke of or to him in the snottiest possible way … so that was it, she was finally going to fix Aaron once and for all.”

Morgan said, “But could you tell what the fixing of Aaron Roth was going to involve? How do you really
fix
somebody?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did she hate her father? I mean, you make it sound like more than a daughter’s spite.”

“Oh, it’s always been more than spite. The thing about Goldie was that she always identified strongly with her mother, Kay—”

“Kay Flanders. More or less America’s Sweetheart. Did you know her well?”

“Sure, I knew her. Kay was a star back on the Maximus lot in the days when Sol Roth, Goldie’s grandfather, was still personally running the show, down to every last detail. The
whole
show. Kay wasn’t quite as big as Garland and Rooney, but she was the closest thing Maximus had—she could pretty well do it all, dance and cry on cue and belt out the big numbers and push her chubby little fingers into her dimples and coo the love songs, and she was pert, perky, prettier than Garland, and came across as happier. But she was always in Judy’s shadow. Because Kay wasn’t a genius, and Judy was … but she was second only to Judy, and I think Sol was perfectly content with that. …

“Anyway, she was a star when Sol put Aaron to work on the lot, the old let-my-son-work-his-way-up routine that puts the kid in the executive-office block in six months. Aaron apparently fell hard for Kay, and Kay must have eventually taken a liking to him … she was a sweet, wide-eyed innocent, virginal and pure and all that stuff on film, but of course she was a real person, older than people thought, and she was very near the top of a very big heap, and it must have occurred to her that marrying Aaron Roth was a hell of a career move. So one summer, there was a hell of a wedding at the Bel Air mansion.”

“The Seraglio,” Morgan said.

“No, Seraglio came later, after the fire. They were married at Bella Donna, the one Goldie wrote the book about. Bella Donna dated back to the twenties, sort of an Italian villa Sol built for his one and only wife, Rebecca, long, long since departed. … Aaron and Kay had a very big,
big
wedding, from what I’ve heard. Sol actually had Fritz Heimrich, who was under contract, come out to the house and direct the ceremony for close-ups and inserts—this was the day before the actual wedding took place. They filmed the real thing, too, and the reels still exist. Credits, cast, everything. People used to say they were surprised that Sol didn’t shoot the wedding-night fuck itself. The irony was that Sol is such a puritanical old guy … he really is, always has been, a maniac about doing things the right way.

“When Goldie was born, the works—Maximus publicity … Simon Karr made sure Kay, America’s little favorite, became America’s favorite mother—whoopee! Kay went on making pictures, Maximus did their best to keep her changing with the times. When I met Goldie, let’s see, Kay was probably forty-five. She wasn’t well then, but I wasn’t told very much about her problems—hell, it was a very dark secret. She was making a mystery at the time, and they were shooting her close-ups through gauze, all that stuff. Freddie Nugent, the cameraman, said they were putting more Vaseline on the lens than he was using on his hemorrhoids. … I was on the lot writing a thing for Jimmy Stewart and Ralph Bellamy, it never got made, which is lucky for all of us, and I used to see the rushes of Kay, and you could see the decay, it was well past the beginning of the end … she was coming apart. The mystery only got release outside the States, and the difference between the Kay in the movie and the Kay I saw over dinner occasionally was scary … she looked like something had gone wrong inside of her and was eating its way out toward the light, like an awful plant. She did some television specials, the one with Danny Kaye was pretty good … but she just had that look, she was used up.

“And Goldie was completely devoted to her, all the more so as Kay began slipping. Her health really went. Goldie became a nurse, practically, and Aaron never slowed down a step, just kept working harder and harder, staying on the lot sixteen, eighteen hours a day. And she never forgave her father. Goldie’s the one who started the story that Aaron carried on a script conference with Tony Flyshaecker all the way through the funeral—the truth was he interrupted a conference with Flyshaecker, went to the funeral, and back to the conference afterward.

“Goldie started a lot of talk about Aaron. He made himself an easy target, not the warmest guy in the world, but I never saw him treat Goldie with anything but courtesy. Aaron can be the worst kind of shit heel, but some of Sol’s class rubbed off on him, had to, I suppose.”

“It’s a sad story,” Morgan reflected. “Typical though. Typical of California, of the movie families, they could call it the Bel Air disease. Families screwed up with power and money, and then people go away or die or something …”

The wind whistled in the fireplace chimney, sparks flew up, and a draft of cold air slithered across the hearth. The light coming through the closed draperies was dull, bleak.

“So I went out to the beach house. Got there about a quarter past eight, said hello to Artie at the Colony gate. Artie said it was good to see me, said he missed me … ‘Miss your smiling face’ was exactly what he said. Anyway, he waved me on through, and I parked behind the garage. I still had a key, which I wasn’t supposed to have, but I’d just forgotten to give it back to her. I had it out to unlock the door connecting the chain-link fence and the garage itself, but the door was unlocked—nothing unusual about that. That’s one of the things about the Colony, you don’t have to spend all your time worrying about locking doors.

“I went up the walk, around to the side door. The sky was dark except for a blood-red line at the horizon, and the surf was maybe three feet—I remember, because it was so damned good to see and smell it all again … in my mind it was still home, where I belonged. I stood there maybe thirty seconds just watching that deep red turn to midnight blue, it moves that fast as it’s going down below the horizon, then I went in the house. I called her name a couple of times, walked down the hallway toward a glow, a lamplight, coming from the main room—it’s just a small house, you know—I can’t recall if I thought there was anything wrong, I was coming down the hall and I suppose I thought she was out on the deck or making drinks … then I came into the familiar room where I’d done so much work and, shit, here it starts to get all blurry. The whole thing traumatized me, put me in some weird shock-corridor, nightmare-alley kind of thing … there she was on the floor, lying on her side, the arm on the floor flung up above her head—I wasn’t thinking straight at all—okay, I’d had several drinks before I left my place, getting up the guts to see her again, it’s true, she still meant something to me. … Christ, you’re getting the whole gruesome story, aren’t you?”

“I asked for it.”

“I remember looking down at her, thinking heart attack, a fainting spell, an accident. I bent down beside her, and I was repeating her name, and then I saw my Oscar on the floor just around the corner of my desk. It had blood and her blond hair stuck to the base, and it scared me, made my skin crawl. I grabbed Goldie’s face, pulled it around, and then I saw her eyes, wide open, staring at me, dry, staring, and I got something sticky on my hand and I knew it was blood and stuff. … It was perfectly obvious that she’d been struck on the head and was now dead.

“Then I think I heard something, some noise, a footstep, inside or outside, I didn’t know, and I grabbed the Oscar without thinking, it was the only thing close at hand resembling a weapon. My brain was climbing the walls, I felt dazed and crazy, but I know damned well what I was thinking at that point—I figured the murderer was still there, that I’d caught him in the act, and then the door came busting open and there were four cops all over me, guns drawn, and it wasn’t too terribly surprising that they voted me most likely murderer.

“If you recall the trial, it turned out that they had been tipped off that Goldie had been murdered, that she was newly dead, and they’d gotten to the house in about twenty minutes, and there stood I with my piccolo.”

“Your bloody piccolo,” Morgan amended, her wide mouth turning up just fractionally at the corners. Challis found this change of expression peculiarly reassuring. “Would you like a drink? Or coffee?”

“A Scotch and soda would keep me talking,” he said. “It’s past noon.”

“Good. I want to know what it was like inside the trial, with all the machinery whirring …”

“Bloody boring, actually.”

She got up, went to the sideboard, and came back with a bottle of Glenlivet, a pot of ice cubes, two heavy squat glasses, and a siphon bottle made of thick green glass with some long-ago brand name almost worn away. She poured two sturdy drinks. The soda hissed across the ice.

“Hilary Durant was your attorney. How could that have been boring?”

“Hilary Durant didn’t exactly bust a gut. He was civilized, he had a big fee coming from Solomon Roth, and he thought I’d simply gotten a bellyful of Goldie, gone crazy at her latest excess, and beaten her to death. So far as I could tell, I didn’t have a motive, and I figured that once they got digging into the investigation, they’d turn up somebody else, somebody with a motive and opportunity, and he’d be the killer.”