Steep and sinuous, the narrow road was a low-gear climb to its cul-de-sac end. I crimped the wheels into the curb and set the brake and glanced through the wrought-iron archway with its embroidered T. X. T. centered in filigree. Sometimes old Tom would await me there on the flagstone walk: he had exceptional hearing and could identify the particular grind of my van.
He wasn’t in sight. I unloaded my gear from the van and lugged it to the door. I was preoccupied with my dilemma—mine and Marilynn’s—and it must have been several minutes before I realized no one had answered the door. I rang the bell again and listened to the silence and felt a jolt of adrenalin: it was true he was in remarkable condition but Tom was just a month short of eighty-seven and I was alerted by the actuarial knowledge that any visit to him might be my last.
I left my things at the door and went around to the side, past the garage that housed Tom’s huge old Packard and around a stand of bamboo and out along the red-tile walkway that led to the back of the property. I ducked under an arched trellis of purple bougainvillea and emerged onto the apron of the swimming pool. The vista was stunning: past the pool the hill plummeted into a brush-studded crumple of canyons and you could see a panorama that looked like the view from an airplane: mountain serrates along half the skyline and the Pacific Ocean along the rest—Catalina Island dark on the horizon. Today even the blue haze was gone; the hot Santa Anas were blowing out of the east and the air was glass-sharp for forty miles.
Tom was sitting in a high canvas director’s chair, Mr. Todhunter painted across the back. He scowled out at the vista, so lost in thought he didn’t hear me behind him until I spoke:
“Are you all right?”
It startled him. “No.” Then his back stiffened. He twisted to look at me. “Who?—It’s you, Christopher. ‘Time’s it?”
“Ten after three. Sorry I’m late, sir. Are you all—”
He squinted at me the way he’d squinted at rustlers, land-grabbers, and other “B”-picture varmints. His rasping deep voice had a younger man’s timbre. “Of course I’m all right.”
“You didn’t answer the doorbell . . .”
“I see,” he said. “Listen: just because I don’t answer every damn bell that rings doesn’t mean you need to call the undertakers just yet.”
I watched him brace both gnarled hands on the arms of the chair and heave himself to his feet. He kept looking out at the canyon but his attention was elsewhere: somewhere inside him.
After a moment he glanced at me. “Thank you for your concern. I guess you want to get started.”
I smiled assent and began to turn away but his voice arrested me: “Look down there.”
I tried to figure out what he was looking at. Below the escarpment the scrub-oak hills tumbled toward the canyon bottom. Sunlight dappled mica particles in the rocks; once in a while you could get a glimpse of deer down there—occasionally a coyote. The gorge curled to the left; out of sight beyond those massive shoulders of rock and brush lurked the blighted plastic sprawl of Santa Monica and Los Angeles.
He said, “They used to set the camera tripod right up here and I used to climb up on that big white horse and chase bad guys all through those trees. Real good angle from right here, looking north so you never got the sun in the lens. My dad was a director, you know.”
“I know.”
“We made forty-eight pictures together. Way back—silent-movie days. Before your time. I used to know every rock and every bush. See that clump of juniper? We used to have a soft bed of sand right below there. I’d ride up alongside of old Fred Kohler or Charlie King and jump him from my horse onto his horse and we’d both take a tumble right on the sand there. I always won those hand-to-hands, of course. The good guy. I like happy endings, you know . . . Did our own stunts in those days, mainly.”
Usually he enjoyed reminiscing but he seemed sour today. He said: “Enjoy the view while you can.”
“What do you mean?”
At first he didn’t answer.
From here only five or six houses were visible, strewn haphazardly about, each one trailing an umbilical driveway that depended circuitously to the paved two-lane highway by the river. The biggest of those houses was Marilynn Orcutt’s and I’d be going there directly after finishing up with Tom.
Even from here it was imposing: a Spanish grandee had built the hacienda with its adobe outbuildings, its corrals and its red-tile roofs around the open courtyard. You could have held scrimmages in that courtyard.
Tom’s place was fifty or sixty years old; the hacienda down there dated back to the Eighteenth Century. Stanley Orcutt had modernized it. Even from up here, nearly a mile above it, I could hear the slap and pound of the diesel generator that provided electricity for the hacienda. Sound carried far in these mountains.
The hacienda was tucked into a steep canyon and it commanded only a narrow wedge of a view. Like the grandees, Marilynn’s husband didn’t care about views unless you could measure them monetarily.
Tom’s voice startled me with its bitterness: he spat the words as if they were bitter-tasting insects that had flown into his mouth:
“Resort complex. Condominiums.”
Then he went into the house.
I brought my gear into the spare bedroom and set up the folding massage table and laid out the oils and conditioners. There was an oil portrait of Tom’s late wife as she’d been in her thirties: a pert redhead with a huge smile. She’d died five or six years ago but still whenever he mentioned her his voice went soft with love.
Wrapped in a big towel he came into the room carrying a rolled-up newspaper. He set it aside and climbed aboard the table face-down. He was smaller than he’d been as a young man; a bit gaunt now, nothing left of the robust beer belly he’d carried during his last few paunchy years in the saddle on the Monogram Pictures back lot, and his face was crosshatched with cracks but it was still recognizably the face I’d seen in all those black-and-white programmers: the same slant of the pale eyes, the familiar heavy thrust of the big jaw.
I began to knead his left foot. “Something interesting in the newspaper?”
“There is.” He didn’t explain.
After a bit I said, “You’re remarkably fit. You still contend you haven’t got a portrait hidden away in the attic someplace?”
“You can’t take personal credit for longevity. It’s just blind luck.” Then the ghost of the familiar big grin: “But if you push me into a corner with a microphone in my face I’ll attribute it to booze, broads, and ‘bacco.”
He lapsed silent for a while. Occasionally he’d grunt when I probed a knotted muscle too hard. The old man was a hedonist; he vocalized his pleasure with sighs and groans.
I’d met him two years ago in the hospital: I did two days a week of physiotherapy there and he’d just had surgery for prostate cancer and they’d sent me in to make him more comfortable. After a few days they’d sent him home but he’d asked me to continue working on him as a private client. Eighty-four and he’d only just discovered the benefits of massage.
The first few months he’d been fragile and tentative, scared by looming mortality. But then the doctors had told him it looked as if they’d caught it in time and he was in remission. After that he’d perked right up and found a young writer who was eager to ghost-write The Thomas X. Todhunter Story, and what with that and his glorious view and his numerous friends and his sippin’ whisky and his twice-weekly massage he was a happy man.
One Thursday afternoon Tom had confided in me: “Some of those old boys likely to get real uncomfortable—the ones that ain’t dead yet. The rest, I expect they’ll be rolling cartwheels in their graves. Listen: I could’ve been dead in the operating room. I’m way past the allotted threescore and ten. Borrowed time, Christopher. What’ve I got to lose? I’m telling it plain and true, boy. I’m letting the buffalo chips fall wherever they want to.” His laughter was loud and wild.
I did the legs and arms and then got down to serious business on his back. He l
iked to hear the joints crack when I manipulated them.
Finally I worked his face and head and neck. That was his favorite; I could always count on his ritual approval: “I swear if you could bottle that you could sell it for millions.”
But he didn’t say it today. He just got off the table and held the towel around him, stared a while at his wife’s portrait—brooding, as if he needed her counsel about something. A sudden suspicion grenaded into me and I said, “Did you get the results from that check-up you had last week?”
“Sure.” He dismissed the question casually. “Everything’s negative—everything’s fine. I’ll live to be at least a hundred and five.” He nodded his head emphatically to confirm it. “I’m not going to fall down, boy. They’re going to have to knock me down.”
Then he picked up the rolled newspaper and looked at it and the sudden disgust in his voice was profound:
“Seems my neighbor Mr. Stanley Orcutt has been buying up parcels of land. Seems he owns the better part of what you can see from here, excepting perhaps the Pacific Ocean. Seems he’s put in for county permission to develop the land.”
He flung the newspaper down on the massage table and poked an accusing finger toward the photograph. “Look at it.”
It was Sunday’s real-estate section. The headline was DEVELOPER PLANS TOPANGA CONDOS. The photo showed an architect’s conception of hilltops tiered and flattened, each one supporting a random jumble of squat apartments that looked rather like children’s toy blocks that might have been glued together at odd corners and then strewn askew.
Tom said: “Brings a whole new meaning to the word ‘ugly,’ doesn’t it.”
“Yes sir, I guess it does.”
“Arrogant fool wants to turn these mountains into a slum.”
“Maybe it won’t happen,” I said.
The old man said, “Aagh,” dismissing it with disbelief; and then he said: “Even his own wife hates what he’s doing. You know the woman, don’t you?”
i was packing the oils away in my doctor-style bag. “I know them both. I give them massages.”
“Beautiful woman. She’s got a sweet disposition.”
“Yes sir, she does.”
Tom gave me a speculative look. He was a man of the world. But he was gentleman enough to keep his suspicions to himself.
I gave the newspaper back to him so I could fold up the table. A few minutes later I said goodbye.
It was less than a mile as the crow might fly; but the road made it just two-tenths short of four miles and it was an eleven-minute journey in the van.
Just beyond the turn-off to Tom’s house there was a lookout point at the side of the road—room for two or three parked cars—and from that curve you could see Orcutt’s hacienda; beyond that point you couldn’t see it any more because the hills got in the way.
I went on along to the Orcutt mailbox and drove up the gravel drive. The doors to the triple garage were open. The steel-grey Seville and Marilynn’s white Mercedes convertible were in their stalls. The third stall was empty—from which I concluded that Stanley Orcutt was out somewhere in the Rolls, doing business—bringing more new meanings to the word “ugly.”
A dented pickup was parked in the circular driveway. I saw lawn-mowers and spreading machines in its stretch bed. Gutierrez Gardening Service. One of the gardeners was making a loud racket with one of those putt-putting backpack blowers, spraying high-pressure air along the entranceway to clear it of twigs and dead leaves. He nodded to me and smiled when I carried my gear past him.
The cleaning lady admitted me to the house and then left me on my own; I was hired help, not deserving of an escort, and I knew the way. I went on back to the exercise room.
Marilynn was in the sauna. I announced myself and heard her voice through the wooden door: “I’ll be right out.” Then—mischievously: “Go ahead and start without me.”
I set up the table and laid out the oils and cremes. She said: “Did your agent have any news about your script?”
“They’re still thinking about it at the network. ‘Taking’ meetings.”
“Don’t be too crestfallen if they don’t buy it, Christopher. Everyone knows they’re idiots. The script’s probably too good for them.” Her voice hadn’t revealed anxiety but when she came out of the sauna I could see it in her eyes.
She was in a green terrycloth robe that matched the color of her eyes. A few wisps of disobedient yellow hair protruded from the towel she’d turbaned around her head. Despite the dressing-room garb she carried herself with glamourous languid grace. She went to the door and looked out into the corridor. When she was satisfied, she pushed it shut and locked it and came back to the table. Soft and hot from the sauna, she came right into my arms.
Despite the heat she was trembling.
After a long while she went away from me, crossing the room. There was anger in her and she was too jangly to lie in my embrace. From the far side of the room she watched me for the longest time and then said, “What would you say—would you think I was insane if I told you I am seriously thinking about committing murder?”
“It’s come down to that, has it?”
She took a deep breath as if to calm herself. “He’s gone public. Did you see the monstrosity in yesterday’s paper?”
“Tom Todhunter showed it to me.”
“Tom phoned here yesterday. I could have heard him without a telephone. Stanley wasn’t here. He was in Malibu or someplace, playing games with balance sheets or whatever that crowd does. I think he’s involved in cocaine deals—I can’t prove it, it’s just a feeling. Anyway—what was I talking about? Oh. Old Tom Todhunter—he called yesterday. I already said that, didn’t I—you can see how upset I am . . . When Tom calmed down I told him I’m just as furious about it as he is. I’m really fond of him. He’s such a dear old thing.” She composed herself and came back to the subject at hand. “I’ve been sorting out murder methods. Poison—a gun—a knife—holding his head under the swimming pool . . .”
I said, “You don’t have to kill anybody. Just divorce him.”
She released a tiny laugh into the room. “I’m going to. Hut I won’t get a penny from him, you know. I signed that damned pre-nuptial agreement. He owes me . . .”
I took her in my arms. “Forget it. We’ll get by. Why, when I’m a famous screenwriter we’ll be able to buy and sell guys like Stanley.”
“I know a couple of successful writers,” she said. “You’ve got an exaggerated idea of how much money they make.”
“Is money that important to you?”
“I honestly don’t know, Christopher. I’ve never been without it.”
Her father had inherited the family business and Marilynn had grown up on the wealthy coast of Rhode Island—old money country, where families were aged in wood like good whisky—but her father had gambled it all away, everything including the button factory. By that time she’d already married Stanley Orcutt.
Astonishing how unpredictably people could change. When Marilynn married Orcutt she’d been just out of Vassar and he’d been young, vigorous, blond, and handsome, a Yale man with lineage as impeccable as her own. They both came from the sort of families that guarded their riches jealously: that was why the pre-nuptial agreements had been signed—contracts by which neither of them could lay hands on the other’s fortune. As things had turned out, Marilynn’s fortune evaporated while Stanley’s multiplied.
She was one of those fair-skinned ice princesses and he was the rich son of an ambitious father and he’d inherited both the wealth and the ambition: he was determined to keep getting richer, and in the process he grew a belly and lost his charm and humanity along with the hair on his scalp. Now he was just another middle-aged overweight hustler—only richer and more powerful than most; and a lot more dangerous: he’d developed the instincts and the personality of a boa constrictor.
He had the remains of a healthy constitution but the muscles were layered over with flab and he depended on massages rather
than exercise to keep him from falling apart completely. Providing his semi-weekly rubdowns was no pleasure for me and I wouldn’t have kept him as a client if it hadn’t been for Marilynn. I hadn’t planned on falling in love with her—or on her falling in love with me.
She said: “He doesn’t want to hear the word divorce. I’m his property, bought and paid for. That’s how he sees it. I’m decorative and decorous. The proper hostess. You have to read between the lines with Stanley because he’s too clever to say anything outright that you might hold against him later—but his meaning is clear enough. If I try to divorce him he’ll make life a holy hell for me and anybody connected with me.”
“Come on, darling. Aren’t you dramatizing just a little? He’s not a gangster.”
“I’m not talking about breaking your arms and legs. He’s more subtle than that. You’d never sell a script in this town, I suspect. You’d get fired by the hospital. Your clients would begin to phone you—so sorry, but we’re going to have to dispense with your services. And then maybe the state would find some irregularity in your license to practice physiotherapy . . .” She was looking at the floor, in a dismal frame of mind. “You and I—we’d end up on food stamps.”
“Better that than Death Row,” I said gently. “You weren’t serious, were you?”
“About murdering him?” She looked up at last: she met my eyes. “Honestly, I don’t know whether I’m serious or not. God knows he’s made me hate him enough—”
“Hey,” I said quietly. “Murder isn’t a solution. Murder’s a problem.”
With a wan attempt at a smile she folded herself against me. “What are we going to do, then?”
“I wish I knew.”
It was just after five Tuesday when the phone in my apartment rang. I’d only been home half an hour or so; I was sucking beer from a can and wrestling at the typewriter with a clumsy transition in the new script. The strident demand of the telephone annoyed me and I was inclined not to answer but after the fourth ring I knew my concentration was broken so I picked it up, stifling anger. “Hello?”
Modern Masters of Noir Page 12