Windhall

by Ava Barry

To my surprise, Petra laughed. “I get it. To be fair, though, I want my name on the byline with yours. I’m not going to slave away so you get all the glory.”

  “Fair.”

  She turned her attention back to the board. “How are you going to fill in the missing pieces?”

  I deliberated for a moment. I didn’t know Petra, and I wasn’t sure if I could trust her. I decided not to tell her about Heather yet, or the missing journals.

  “I found a photograph of Theo,” I said. “I want to identify the other people in the photo. There’s a young woman, and an old lady in the background.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I took out the photograph of Theo and the young woman dancing, which I had put in a protective sleeve. Petra examined it.

  “Where do we start?” she asked.

  “Bernard Loew,” I said. “We start with him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s dead now,” I said. “But he was a brilliant set designer in the forties and fifties. He worked on every single one of Theo’s films, but Theo fired him from Last Train to Avalon.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody knows,” I said. “But he was one of the men who saw Theo in the garden with Eleanor’s body. They’d been cordial that evening, but Bernard was one of the people who took the stand against him and said that he was absolutely guilty. He has a son, and I want to get in touch with him. His name is Marcus, and he writes music for movies.”

  “I’ll reach out to him.”

  “I have a partial list of all the attendees at the party, but I want you to help me fill it out. I’m probably only missing a few people; we can see if anyone is still alive, or if they have children who remember their parents talking about that night.”

  “Got it.”

  “The medical examiner said that Eleanor’s body had been moved that night,” I said. “She was killed, her body cooled. Based on the lack of blood in the garden, and the coagulation of the blood around the puncture wound, she was moved at least an hour after the death occurred.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You okay? This isn’t too much for you?”

  “No, I want to do this,” she said. “My best friend has an abusive ex, so I know a little bit about it.”

  We were both quiet for a long moment.

  “There was a second set of footprints by the body,” I went on. Talking about murder and abuse normally made my chest feel tight, but Petra’s presence was strangely calming. “It made the detectives think that Theo had an accomplice. They never found the shoes that made the footprints, but they were men’s shoes.”

  “You’ve really done your research, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve always wanted to solve this case,” I said. “Unfortunately, most of the key players are dead.”

  I dug through my files for a minute until I found what I was looking for. “Here’s a list of almost everyone who was at the party,” I said.

  “Where did you get these names?”

  “I’ve put together a list from the trial transcripts,” I said. “Not everyone at the party testified, but Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were both there, and they wrote about this case to no end. There’s another piece of missing evidence we need to find if we’re going to solve this case.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Where Theo killed Eleanor,” I said.

  She hesitated for a second. “I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a second,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What if he didn’t do it? What if he was framed?”

  “Then we’ll prove his innocence.” I struggled not to roll my eyes. “I doubt it, though.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll start going through this list. Anything else I should work on?”

  “Keep an eye out for women named Connie,” I said. “Anything like Conchita, Constance, Connery.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not important right now,” I said. “I’ll tell you when I figure it out.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There’s something I’m working on, but I could use an extra set of eyes,” I said. “I’m looking for someone named Ben.”

  “Is height important, or will you take anyone?” she joked.

  “No, I’m looking for a specific Ben,” I said. “I don’t know his last name. He’s a friend of Theo’s, and I think he probably knows something.”

  I took out my phone and texted her all the Ben contacts that I had lifted from Leland’s phone.

  “He’s about five nine, dark hair that’s started going gray. He’s probably late fifties. I’ll tell you once I figure out more, but start working through this list and see if any of them match that description. Hold on, I’ve got a picture of him.”

  I scrolled through the images on my phone until I found the pictures I had taken of Leland and Ben at Windhall.

  She took my phone and examined the photo. “You think he might have had something to do with the dead girls?” she asked.

  “I can only begin to speculate.”

  “How will I find him?”

  I smiled. “Get creative,” I said. “This job will take you places you never imagined.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I woke up early. My interview with Theo was later that day, and I hadn’t been able to sleep. I had stayed up late the night before, reading through the first of the journals that Heather had given me, taking notes of every single name and place that Theo mentioned. The wall of evidence in my office had grown into something much bigger, crisscrossed with new names and questions.

  After reading through the journals, I pictured Eleanor in the garden, wilting against a bed of dead flowers, a bloody hole in her rib cage. I tried to reconcile that image with the voice I heard in my head as I read Theo’s journals. Something didn’t fit, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  There was something else that bothered me about the journals, and that was the fact that a lot of pages had been torn out. I had kept a sporadic journal of my own throughout the years, and knew that tearing a page out could sometimes indicate dissatisfaction with one’s own writing, but I wondered if it didn’t indicate that Heather had torn out pages to hide something else.

  I glanced at my watch; Leland was going to send a driver over at any minute. I went into my bedroom and quickly got dressed, then glanced at myself in the mirror, wondering if my outfit was appropriate. I had decided on a button-down white shirt and black slacks, but I looked like a caterer. I tossed the slacks and was stepping into a pair of blue jeans when there was a knock on my door.

  “Coming,” I called.

  I opened the door to a diminutive man with salt-and-pepper hair and pale eyes. He frowned when he saw me.

  “Are you Mr. Hailey?”

  “Max Hailey, yes.”

  “I am Fritz,” he said, staring at my pants. “Mr. Langley’s personal assistant. Mr. Bates has drawn up a contract for you to sign, and I have brought it with me.”

  With a little flourish, Fritz presented the document. I read through it carefully and had to admire Leland’s legal parlance. The terms that we had agreed to were outlined at great length: I was to have two full interviews with Theo, both at Windhall, and after one of these interviews Theo would consent to give me a tour of the house. I was not allowed to photograph nor record Theo in any way, even if he gave me consent to do so on the occasion.

  After reading the contract twice, I signed it, then handed it back to Fritz.

  “Follow me, please.”

  I followed him onto the street and whistled when I saw an immaculate, cream-colored Mercedes-Benz, an old model in perfect condition.

  “Wow, some car,” I said. “What is that—1940s?”

  “Quite right.”

  “Where did Theo dig up that beauty?”

  “It was new when Mr. Langley purchased it.”

  “Of course it was.”

  “Please, get in.”

  I started to get into the fron
t passenger seat, but Fritz quickly shook his head.

  “You ride in the back.”

  The old car was in pristine condition, but there was a certain smell to it: the rich, oily flavor of polish at the back of my throat, a cold thrill of dust and caught air, the brittle smell of ancient leather. Fritz didn’t seem eager for conversation, so I occupied myself by looking out the window as he drove through Laurel Canyon. I had driven down these streets hundreds of times, but I hadn’t been a backseat passenger in my own neighborhood for years, not since before my grandmother had died.

  The idea of meeting Theo hadn’t fully come home to me yet. He was still just a black-and-white flicker, a two-dimensional specter mostly composed of urban legends and hearsay.

  We hit Hollywood Boulevard, and Fritz turned left. I waited a moment, then cleared my throat.

  “Aren’t we going to Windhall?”

  He didn’t respond, and I tried again.

  “Windhall is in the other direction.”

  Again, there was no response. I waited another minute, to be sure that we driving away from Beverly Hills, then spoke up again.

  “Look, I grew up in Los Angeles,” I said. “I know my way around. You’re going the wrong way.”

  “There is a traffic accident on Sunset,” Fritz said, meeting my eyes in the mirror.

  “How do you know?”

  “My smartphone tells me,” Fritz said. “I have the GPS.”

  There was no point in arguing, so I sat back again. It had been a while since I had driven through Hollywood; even though I worked less than a mile away, I generally avoided the neighborhoods above Sunset.

  Hollywood looked dull and sleepy in the hazy afternoon sunlight. Signs for acting classes and cheap phone plans were plastered over the old banks and high-rises, and men stood on the sidewalks, waving signs for overpriced parking lots. Sunlight pricked the high western windows, which glittered like blind eyes in the depths of the ruins of Hollywood.

  The street was clogged with red tourist buses and taxis. Street performers in smeared makeup and matted fur costumes prowled outside a mall, and a swarm of tourists crouched on the sidewalks to take pictures next to the terrazzo stars on the Walk of Fame. Homeless people wandered the sidewalks, and when we pulled up to a red light, one of them approached the car. He wore a leopard-print dress and fuzzy moon boots. His eyes were protected by Kanye West–style sunglasses. Fritz gave him a filthy look, then got in the right lane and turned.

  Here the yards were penned off behind metal fences. The lawns were little more than dirty intermezzos between the sidewalk and front door, and the plastic spires of children’s playhouses emerged from behind dying hedges. It was a sad tapestry.

  “The accident is cleared up,” Fritz announced. “We will go to Beverly Hills now.”

  A dismal feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. I had learned to tune out the changes to the city, the tourists and the pollution, but in my mind, there had always been a separation between the old Hollywood and what had come to replace it. Driving around Hollywood in Theo’s old car made it difficult to see the borders anymore, and it was starting to become clear that the old world was really gone, would never come back.

  I steeped in melancholia for the remainder of the ride to Windhall. We finally arrived on Theo’s street, and I waited for Fritz to make a smart comment as we pulled up to the tall gates, but he said nothing. I watched him climb out of the car and laboriously push the gates open, then get back in the car and guide it carefully up the drive.

  Even though I had visited Windhall many times before, it was surreal to come as an invited guest. The great house still hid its face, but I caught glimpses of it through the trees. I glanced around eagerly, trying to absorb all the details that I had missed in the darkness. I tried to reconcile the images of present-day Windhall with the black-and-white parties where elegant women draped in white silk strolled through the lawns. Theo had been a part of that world; he had seen Hollywood before it became a town of swollen boulevards and hazy afternoon sunlight.

  The driveway wound its way up through the property, bumpy in sections where roots had disrupted the pavement. Fritz pulled up to the front steps and stopped the car.

  “Mr. Langley will be waiting, sir.”

  I gathered up my things and got out of the car, then walked up the steps. At any moment, the fantasy could break and reality could come crashing back in. I was standing at the precipice of two opposing time periods: the delicate, black-and-white world, full of smoky mirrors and tragic women, and present-day Los Angeles, which had steamrolled over every other decade in favor of the future.

  I knocked on the door.

  A quiet moment expired before I heard a metal snick, and then the front door swung open to reveal an old man. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that I might not recognize Theo, and I wasn’t entirely sure that the man standing before me was the same man that I had been studying for most of my life. He was old, certainly, but he looked far too energetic and sharp to be in his early nineties. He was taller than I was, with ramrod-straight posture and long limbs. His white hair was close-cropped, and he peered at me with sharp green eyes.

  “It’s about time,” he growled. “You must be here about the dishwasher.”

  It took me a moment for the comment to register. “What?”

  “It stopped working a few days ago,” he went on. “Nasty smell. I think a rat might have crawled into the wires and had a family. You have a problem with rats?”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “I can’t guarantee it’s a rat, you know. It might be something bigger. How do you feel about raccoons?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you think you could kill a house cat with your bare hands?” he asked, peering at me closely. “You look like you’ve got some muscle on you. There’s something in there, I tell you, and it sounds mean.”

  “I don’t think I could,” I said, baffled.

  “Then why the hell did you come?”

  “I’m a writer,” I said. “I work for the LA Lens. Are you Theo?”

  The man glared at me. “Do I look like a Hollywood legend? I’m the old butler.”

  “I’m sorry, my mistake.”

  The man glared at me for another minute, then threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  “I couldn’t resist,” he said. “I was eating breakfast this morning, and I couldn’t remember for the life of me what year it was. I’m positively ancient. It would make a great movie, wouldn’t it? Hiring an elderly butler who couldn’t keep track of hours, days, years… he’d answer the door and forget whether you were home or not. He’d go out to get the morning paper and keep walking until he hit Sunset. You’d never see him again.”

  “Yes… that’s very good…”

  “Don’t take the joke personally,” he said, waving a hand at me. “I’d have saved it for a door-to-door salesman, but we don’t get them anymore. I haven’t had an unwanted visitor since I killed Eleanor.”

  I stared at him, unsure what to say.

  “A joke! That was a joke.”

  “Are you Theo?”

  “Where are my manners? Yes, I’m Theo,” he said, extending his hand. I took it and was surprised at how firm his grip was. “You have to forgive me, Max, I don’t get the opportunity to bullshit people the way I used to.”

  “Call me Hailey, if you like.”

  Theo raised an eyebrow. “I most certainly will,” he said. “Come in, come in. And wipe your feet!”

  I stepped into the house, then took a look around in stunned silence. Everything had changed since my last visit; it looked like the entire house had been cleaned with a toothbrush. The black-and-white floor tiles in the foyer sparkled in the shafts of sunlight that came in through the door, and the walls had been scrubbed of cobwebs and swaths of dust.

  Theo watched my observations with a little smile. “We prepared the house for your visit,” he said.

  “I see that.”

 
; “I hope you don’t mind,” he said airily. “The house had gotten a bit… stale.”

  “Had it?”

  “Oh, let’s lose the pretense! I know that you were in my house; you know that I know. Let’s acknowledge it and move on.”

  Theo had been busy in the last few days. As we moved through the house, I could see that every inch of the great house had been scrubbed, and that was no easy feat. He must have hired an entire team of cleaners. If my whole game plan relied on finding a piece of Eleanor’s DNA to prove that Theo had killed her inside Windhall, my task had just become a lot more difficult. By the look of things, it would be difficult to find even a piece of Theo’s DNA in the floorboards.

  “You will let me know if you have any questions, won’t you, Max? Er, Hailey.”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me something,” Theo said, as we entered the kitchen. “Did Fritz take you down Coldwater Canyon, or did he drive you through Hollywood?”

  “We went through Hollywood.”

  “That bastard!” Theo said. “He does it on purpose, you know.”

  “Does what?”

  “Fritz thinks I’ve let Windhall go to ruin, with the yard falling into disrepair and what have you. He’s rather theatrical, likes to show guests the seedier parts of Los Angeles before they arrive. He thinks it makes me look good by comparison.”

  “Guests…?”

  Theo waved his hands. “A figure of speech. The only guest I’ve had in the last week is my lawyer, of course. Halloween’s just around the corner—I might get trick-or-treaters for the first time in fifty, sixty years.”

  “Somehow I doubt it.”

  “Well, I’ll have to content myself with trespassers, then. Would you like some lemonade? We can take it in the garden.”

  “Yes, please.”

  There was no fridge, of course, and I hadn’t seen any evidence that the electricity had been turned back on. Sunlight streamed in through narrow windows, but the effect was very gothic: furniture cast in shadows, tapestries and rugs bare suggestions against the dim pallor of the house.

  A pitcher of lemonade sat on the kitchen counter, next to two glasses.

  “Does Fritz know what the house used to look like?”