by Ava Barry
“Get that out of my face, would you?”
The man wielding the flashlight hesitated, then aimed the light away from our faces. As my eyes recalibrated, I could see a vague silhouette behind the light.
“I’ll ask you again,” he said softly. His voice had a Southern lilt. “What’s your business here?”
“We were standing on the fire trail,” I said, pointing up. “I saw someone sneaking into Windhall.”
The man mulled over the information. “What’s your name?”
“Max Hailey.”
“And your friend?”
“Madeleine Woolner,” she spoke up. “Who are you?”
The man was silent for a long moment. “There’s been a murder,” he said. “A girl died up here a few days back. It’s dangerous to be out wandering at night.”
“The same could be said for you,” I argued.
“Don’t you worry about me,” the man said, then laughed. “I’m the most dangerous thing out here tonight.”
His voice was genteel, easy but polished. East Coast Southern, either South Carolina or Georgia, maybe Kentucky with a Yale education. My eyes had adjusted enough to see that he wasn’t a policeman, or, at least, not a cop in uniform. He wore a linen shirt and slacks, a dark wool sweater. I couldn’t see his face against the darkness, but I could see a sweep of dark hair. Without fully realizing it, I had edged in front of Madeleine again, in case the man proved to be dangerous.
“Go on, now,” the man said. “It’s time you headed home.”
Madeleine and I didn’t speak as we made our way back up the crumbling cliffside toward the fire trail. I kept my hand on her elbow, gripping her every time she stumbled or came close to falling.
By the time we reached the trail, I was angry.
“Let it go,” Madeleine said, turning and seeing my face. “Let’s just go home.”
“He shouldn’t be down there,” I said. “He’s not even a cop.”
“How can you tell?”
“Trust me, I can tell. College wasn’t too long ago.”
“Right, sorry,” Madeleine said, catching on. “You think he was the one to kill that girl?” She was only half serious. “I don’t think he’d want to get bloodstains on those clothes.”
“He’s probably a neighbor,” I said. “One of those people with too much spare time on his hands, making sure nobody trespasses.”
“Let’s go home, Hailey.”
We walked back toward the car in silence, then climbed in and drove toward Los Feliz. When I dropped Madeleine off at her house, she turned to give me a sympathetic look. She squeezed my arm but got out of the car without a word.
* * *
Even after I dropped Madeleine off at home, I couldn’t stop thinking of the man behind Windhall. It didn’t matter to me who he was, or what he was doing there, so much as his air of entitlement. I had been surrounded by rich assholes my entire life, people who thought they could tell me what to do.
As I drove home, I remembered what my grandmother had told me about Theo.
“A gentleman, Max,” she had said. “That’s the thing I remember the most, in spite of all the other things that happened afterward. I can’t shake the memory from my mind. Theo always treated me like a perfect gentleman.”
TWO
The next morning I called Thierry as I drove to work. He picked up after two rings.
“Hailey.”
“Hey, Thierry,” I said. “I need a favor.”
There was a pause. “Am I on speakerphone?”
“I’m driving, T.”
“You ever heard of Bluetooth?”
“Can’t afford that shit. I’m a writer.”
“You don’t make enough money working as a writer, come back and work for me. I paid you good money.”
“We’re getting off topic,” I said. “I need you to look into Windhall again.”
“I’ve told you, Hailey, you need to give that shit up.”
Here’s what you need to know about Thierry: even though he was inching toward thirty-four, he looked like he’d woken up on the wrong side of middle-aged. Squat, with a pale face and a generous bald spot, T was the son of Polish immigrants. He spoke English with no discernible accent, though occasionally an off-phrase would slip in, like the way he referred to the epicenter of Los Angeles as “the Hollywood” and cobbled phrases together in the manner of someone who’s learned English from a ’70s sitcom.
Thierry was a friend and someone I turned to in emergencies, because his web of underground contacts was one of the most extensive networks in the city. I’d met him after dropping out of college. I’d come back to Los Angeles and found that my grandmother couldn’t support me, so I got a job with an estate sales company owned by Thierry’s uncle. The job was pretty simple: someone would die, and their kids or grandkids would hire us to come in, clean stuff up a bit, and sell it for a tidy bundle. My coworkers were a bunch of illiterate ex-cons for whom conversation was limited to the type of fractured run-ons you see printed on the wall of a restroom, but we got along well enough.
Thierry was our boss, and he ruled over us with aplomb. Here’s something else to be said about Thierry: in a city filled with pretentious assholes who can’t tell a Klee from a finger painting, Thierry managed to sort through all the bullshit and make a serious amount of cash. He might’ve seemed rough around the edges, but if you wanted to sell your stuff for the right amount, Thierry was your guy.
Thierry and I had stayed in touch after I saved up enough money to go back to school, and he’d even been one of the few guests at my grandmother’s funeral. When I came back from Illinois, a journalism dropout with a stack of bills and not much else, Thierry had reached out and offered me a place on his team. I’d declined, but Thierry had become an important contact nonetheless, and he’d even been partially responsible for the story that had started my flimsy career and earned me a contract writing for the Los Angeles Lens.
Thierry knew that I was fascinated by Windhall, but it had been a matter of debate between us for years. It wasn’t unusual for people who grew up in Los Angeles to have a strong opinion about the Langley trial: you were either convinced that he did it, or adamant that he’d been framed. Thierry didn’t entirely approve of my interest in Theo and Windhall, but he still kept an eye out for anything that came from Windhall.
“Look,” I persisted. “Madeleine and I went there last night. Something’s going on, but I’m not sure what it is. You heard anything from your contacts?”
“Take me off speakerphone, Hailey,” Thierry said. “You know I hate that shit.”
“Still driving.”
“Is the phone sitting in your lap? I’m in your fucking lap, aren’t I?”
“ ’Course not,” I lied.
Thierry’s voice went quiet as he muttered something, and I realized he must be talking to someone at work. I could hear other voices in the background, and then Thierry came back to me.
“Someone called me about a month ago.” His voice drifted up from my crotch. “Wanted to sell me something that belonged to Theo. Or maybe it didn’t belong to him, but it had to do with him. Said it was some kind of missing film.”
I frowned. “He’s full of shit,” I said. “Everyone knows that Theo’s last film is gone. If it still existed, it would be worth a fucking fortune.”
“Yeah, I blew him off. Guy seemed a little weird. He’s a professional magician, for fuck’s sake.”
“You haven’t heard anything else?”
“That’s it. I’ll send you the guy’s number, if I find it. He lives with his mom, you guys probably have a lot to talk about.”
“I live in my gran’s house, asshole, there’s a difference.”
“Yeah, yeah, Hailey, single white males living rent-free. Sounds the same to me.”
“Speaking of Theo,” I said. “You hear anything about the journals?”
“No, Hailey, Jesus Christ. Those journals don’t exist. I’m telling you, someone burned them but
good.”
“They exist,” I said. “I’m going to find them.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I could almost hear him rolling his eyes.
“Put me in touch with that magician, would you? I’d like to check it out, just in case.” And with that, I hung up.
Theo’s last movie was called Last Train to Avalon. The film had been mid-production when Eleanor was murdered, and for many Langley fanatics, it was the holy grail of iconography. All of Theo’s infamous team had worked on it, including Eleanor as the leading lady. Stories and snatches of what the film had been about were open to speculation; since Theo always kept his films under a tight protective seal until they were finished, nobody outside the production had been allowed to see the script before he started filming.
Last Train to Avalon had always been a hot topic of debate in Los Angeles, and over the years it had become a kind of urban myth. Even those who were convinced that Theo had killed Eleanor were forced to concede that Avalon would have put Theo up there with the rest of the great directors: your Hitchcocks, Capras, and Langs. Even though the movie had been shut down and locked away after Eleanor died, stories had leaked about production. All remaining copies of the script had been destroyed, but I had heard enough about it to know the gist of the story: a hapless actor comes out to Los Angeles, hoping to strike it big in the film industry. When he gets there, of course, he finds that the whole place is smoke and mirrors.
If this sounds tame, stay tuned. It soon becomes clear that the only way for the young man to succeed in Los Angeles is to partake in an ongoing cycle of abuse involving the wealthy men who run Hollywood and the desperate young women who are powerless to protect themselves. In addition to being a revolutionary statement, the script made no secret about who it was condemning.
According to popular belief, Eleanor had been killed because she was one of the writers behind the film. Some people maintained that Theo had been the studio lackey who had done the job; others said that if the death hadn’t gotten so much attention, Theo would have been the next one to be killed.
I had always been curious about the movie, but I was just as curious to see the set that Theo had built for it. Avalon was reportedly a miniature scale model of Los Angeles. It was made of tiny buildings and wide boulevards, crooked alleyways and pepper trees hanging over Hollywood Boulevard, back when that part of town still had a bit of green. Gran explained that Theo was so precise in shots that when he was in the planning stages of a film, he liked to have a miniature set to refer to. Sometimes these sets made it into the film itself, used in establishing shots and overhead angles.
Before the murder, people called Theo a magician, and in the 1940s, his kind of talent would have seemed like magic. While most sets were made of plywood and sealing wax, Theo’s sets took months of painstaking labor and attention to detail. For The Queen’s Shadow, Theo had ordered a miniature Versailles built in a warehouse in Glendale. His production assistants scoured Los Angeles, buying up mirrors of every shape and size to line the fabled hallways. Gold leaf and trinkets of every shade of yellow were purchased for the set walls. Old windows were broken apart to construct the miniature chandeliers that adorned the ceilings, and all the frescoes were painstakingly re-created by one of Theo’s favorite set designers.
Theo was adamant that no spectators or guests ever intrude on his filming, and in that way, his sets remained among the most exclusive rooms in Los Angeles. His protocols didn’t necessarily change after a movie had wrapped, either: those sets that were able to be disassembled were packed away in crates and relegated to a top secret storage facility, while the larger, freestanding sets had a mysterious way of disappearing.
Avalon was fascinating, that was for certain, but there was something else that I was keen to get my hands on, and that was Theo’s journals.
If Theo’s journals still existed, and I was almost positive that they did, there was a chance that they could prove who killed Eleanor. The journals were the reason the murder trial had been thrown, and Theo had been allowed to walk free. During the trial, the prosecution had felt that the case was on the verge of being dismissed, and so the chief trial prosecutor had done something very, very stupid: he hired someone to break into Theo’s house.
What they were looking for was never clear, but what they found were Theo’s journals. An avid registrar, Theo was known for writing down every mundane detail that happened on and off set. His journals were always the same; slim parchment notebooks purchased from a drugstore on Vine Street.
And inside of them, the prosecution insisted, was the key to why he had murdered Eleanor.
* * *
My office was in Hollywood, just off Sunset and Wilcox. The office took up the whole second floor of a run-down apartment building done up in the classic Spanish hacienda style that had been popular in the late ’20s and ’30s. Spiky palms and banana plants littered the courtyard with leaves that looked like moldy strips of wallpaper, and at least once a week, some homeless guy would pass out there. Once, thirty or forty years before, an aspiring actress had leaped from a fourth-story balcony to her death, and that meant that every once in a while, ghoul crews came to visit the spot and ogle the dent in the ground where her head had smacked the pavement.
Once you got past the homeless people and the suicides, our building had a lot of charm. The lobby still had an old reception desk, complete with pigeonholes and mail slots. Old wallpaper and crown molding that needed to be replaced lent an eerie air to the lobby, which was always empty. The elevator had an intersecting iron door, but it hadn’t worked in the last decade, so everyone took the stairs. It was all a bit macabre, but most of the time I felt like I worked for the last decent publication in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Lens was a quirky magazine that highlighted the underground, the bizarre, and the outright disturbing. It had been founded in the mid-’70s, and, once, it had real clout. The couches in the lobby had been occupied by the likes of Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp, and nearly every left political rally began in the courtyard of our building. We championed the neopolitical losers; the left-wing nutcases; gay, trans, and gender-queer quasi terrorists who wouldn’t blink at the thought of bombing out the office building of a racist, rightist regime. The Laurel Canyon crowd used to get stoned and drop acid in the office of Ford Fordham, our editor in chief.
When Ford had announced his retirement three months earlier, everyone wondered if the magazine would finally go under. We’d made the switch to an online format six months before, and Ford had insisted he wasn’t the right man for the job anymore. The magazine had changed a lot since its inception. We still had healthy cultural and political sections, but our readers were mostly interested in cult: strange murders, spooky history, speakeasy bars, and boarded-up hotels. We wrote about places like Necromance and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The most hits our magazine had gotten was the creepy story about the Cecil Hotel, where a Canadian tourist had mysteriously drowned herself in the rooftop water tank.
The office itself was a tribute to everything weird in Los Angeles. Taxidermied animals sat on a shelf in our entrance room, which was ruled over by an enormous secretary desk. One of the old editors had scored the desk from a massive drug-bust estate sale in Calabasas, and when he had disassembled it to fit it through the doorway, he’d uncovered eight bags of cocaine tucked up inside the legs. We’d taken the doors off all the bedrooms and turned them into offices, and even though we suffered from the occasional bit of loose ceiling plaster, everyone who worked at the Lens loved their job.
Ever since Mad and I had gone to see Windhall, I had been thinking about the dead art student. I hadn’t wanted to write about it, not at first; I didn’t want to pick up some pulpy piece of murder gossip bound to pull readers from TMZ. The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense that I should be the one to unspool this new story. Nobody else at the Lens cared about Theo, at least, not to the degree that I did. There was only one person I was going to have to convince, a
nd he had about as much sense as a three-day-old corpse left out in the sun: my new editor.
When Ford retired, he told us that he had chosen a replacement, someone much more culturally attuned and capable of steering the magazine toward a younger audience. The new editor in chief was nearly the exact opposite of everything that Ford had represented, and I tried to keep this in mind as I walked through the lobby.
I reached his door, and found that it was open.
“Right, Pulitzers. The only award that Los Angeles cares about is the Oscar. Golden Globes? Don’t make me laugh. Grammys, maybe, but you want respect, you need a big O.”
I rapped on the door, and my editor turned to give me a thumbs-up.
“Gotta go, Dad. Yeah, yeah, see you there.”
Brian turned off his Bluetooth and grinned at me. “Hailey’s comet,” he said. “What’s good?”
“I’ve got an idea for a story.”
“Well, step on in, brother.”
Brian was a full six inches shorter than me, with a defiant red pompadour that could, on a day without humidity, raise his height a good two inches. Brian wasn’t a bad guy, per se, but when I met him, he wasn’t even vaguely interested in writing. His mother’s side of the family was heavily invested in NASCAR, and up until six months ago, that’s where Brian’s life had been headed. The fact that he was Ford’s son didn’t seem to imbue him with any bohemian leanings, either. The Lens had even done a piece about his racing career—in one of the photos, he posed with a former Playmate of the Month; in another, he did loops around a track in San Pedro that Marty, our staff photographer, captured.
“Dude sprayed himself with Axe body spray before every lap,” Marty had complained, and all the underlings at the paper had laughed. Still, nobody had really had a problem with Brian until he decided to take over his dad’s position at the magazine.
Brian had been editor for only three months, but he had already made some drastic changes. Even though Ford had assured everyone that his son would continue to guide the magazine in a similar direction, their taste in stories was so vastly different that sometimes I felt like the office was being featured on a bad reality show. While our magazine had once felt like a sagging mansion filled with precious, broken objects, Brian’s influence had already begun to present itself in the form of sports banners, advertisements for nightclubs and new deejays, and a collection of Jason Statham movie posters in Ford’s old office.