Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  “Is it what you think?”

  She looked at him long enough for him to become aware of all the small noises again. “Why are you here? Why did you come all this way, when you’d already spoken with him once tonight? God, look at it, Toby. You have a bloody fistfight with him at my bookstore, and a few hours later you follow him to his yacht and, bang, he’s dead. … Why didn’t you just come back to my house?”

  “Oh, God.” He sighed, squeezed his temples in a vise of fingers. “Look, I’ve had a very weird night. …” His eyes roved irresistibly, against his will, toward the thing in the chair behind the desk. “And I keep thinking he’s gonna get up out of his chair, come right over here, and drip that runny stuff on me—”

  “Stop it!” she cried past a clenched fist.

  He stood up slowly, steadied himself on the back of the couch, and opened the porthole above their heads. The breeze and the mist seemed to cool his frustration and anger.

  “Don’t worry about how weird it’s been.” Her voice flexed with tension. “It makes a difference—just tell me why you came here.”

  “Look, shouldn’t we leave? Aren’t you in shock or something? I mean—”

  “I’m tough, I’m not in shock, and this won’t take long. I just want you to convince me you didn’t come here and kill Jack Donovan.”

  “What if I did kill him? Would it make any difference, was he so wonderful?”

  “To me?”

  “To you, of course. Would it change anything, really?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Yes, it would make a difference to me. It has nothing to do with what kind of man Jack was … good Lord, what kind of reasoning is that?”

  “Well, hallelujah! Somebody cares about this asshole even though he’s only got half his head—this is something new for me, see. I’ve been getting the idea that once you’re dead, it just doesn’t matter who killed you.”

  “The point is, Toby, I don’t want you to be the one who killed him. Now, come on, sit down, or stand, but stop clenching your fists and looking like you’re about to burst a blood vessel.” She almost smiled, looking up at him.

  Watching her, he felt his breath regulating and his blood pressure doing a belly-flop back toward a semblance of normality. “Like I say, it’s been a weird night that has just kept getting weirder. It’s like I’m being asked to pass a series of crazy tests. You wouldn’t believe it … people in clown makeup coming out of the fog like flying saucers, Sol Roth padding around in the dark with a dog the size of a horse, people lying to me, people telling me the truth—I went to see them, Aaron and Sol, when I left your party.”

  “Then we can add them to the list of people who know you’re alive and well—”

  “Oh, hell, Sol and Aaron and Daffy and Tully Hacker and the butler. I mean, they were ready and waiting, Donovan had called Aaron and told him to expect me. Old Graydon met me at the door and didn’t bat an eye, seemed like old times.”

  “Donovan?” The reserve and fear were finally gone; her natural curiosity and whatever existed between her and Challis had gotten the better of her. She had unfolded her legs, resumed her normal length, and was leaning forward anxiously, licking her lips, eyes darting, color back in her cheek’s. “Donovan told them to expect you? Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, lady, but here goes.” He took a deep breath. “I came to this goddamn boat because Solomon Roth told me that Donovan had blackmailed the Roths out of a million dollars, blackmail plain and simple.” Her eyes widened, her face drew itself together in a look of concentration he was growing accustomed to—and welcomed—while he told her what had happened with Aaron and Solomon Roth. It all came tumbling out like a dog’s breakfast: Aaron’s evasions, Solomon’s insistence on telling the truth about Kay’s diaries, Goldie’s threat to publish them, Donovan’s double cross of Goldie … the cool million … and the motive it gave Donovan for wanting Goldie shut up for good.

  Morgan raised her eyebrows and right hand simultaneously. “But money didn’t mean anything to Goldie, right?”

  “Right,” Challis said. “There wasn’t money enough anywhere to buy her out of her chance to stick it to Aaron.”

  “So Donovan was in big trouble with Goldie if the diaries didn’t get published, with Sol and Aaron if they did.” She nibbled a blunt, clear fingernail.

  “So I came out to the boat on this rotten, wet, exhausted night to confront Donovan with all this, no big-deal plan—I’m too damn tired and scared to have a plan. I figured he’d had quite a night himself and was scared, too, maybe not as scared as old Toby, but he had a helluva lot more to lose than old Toby. Maybe if I came on strong enough, I could crack him—well, I had to get him to admit the blackmail, then he might go all the way and admit killing her. I think maybe I was hoping that breaking him down might make my own memory of the night come back—maybe I saw him, Donovan, the murderer … somebody on the porch, a noise in the hallway …” He was drifting, almost too tired to fight it off. “All that sand on the floor … I need to remember all that …”

  She put her hand on his arm, spoke quietly. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay, tired … but why were you here? You convince me you didn’t come out here and kill Citizen Kane.” He sneezed and his eyes watered. “If I get a cold, I’m gonna kill myself.”

  “I went home from the party early, not long after you and Jack left. Everything just went sour … the author got drunk and made a clumsy, stupid pass at me, grabbed my breast and hurt me, the little jerk … I mean, he’s not a jerk, but, Christ, I wasn’t in the mood, I wasn’t feeling well—I’ve been more upset about this whole thing, the more I’ve come to grips with the facts of your situation. It had had sort of a larky quality up in the mountains, and when I was turning you into somebody new and buying clothes for you … but I was fooling myself, pretending it was all going to be all right, like an old movie. When you and Jack had the fight, the reality got to me and I felt lousy. When I got back to the house, it wasn’t any better. I didn’t know what had gone on between you and Jack. I didn’t know where you had gone. But I was sure of where Jack would go—the boat. So I called him here and tried to ask him about your conversation, but he sounded strange, sort of drunk and depressed and crazy and terrified, it was all he could do to talk, he kept babbling about you and my father, none of it made any sense. It was stupid of me, but I decided to drive out and see him. I certainly wasn’t going to be able to sleep. I kept hearing the mountain collapsing, anyway, the damn rain dripping on the patio … dumb, dumb, dumb. The truth is, I was worried about you, dammit, you. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, what to expect … Well”—she wiped at a tear in the corner of her eye, sniffled—“I got here and I could smell what turned out to be the gunshot, I guess, all the way out on the deck. I don’t know what I was thinking—I came running down the corridor, and there he was in the chair and I just stood there trying to take it all in, so scared and confused I couldn’t move, then somebody hit me a funny glancing blow on the head and grabbed me around the face from behind and sort of smothered me or something. Anyway, like an idiot I blacked out and woke up in a closet … I must have interrupted the killer … I kept fading in and out in that fucking little closet, I thought I’d suffocate, but I finally broke the lock with that club I found on the floor in the closet—and that was when I heard you on the deck. I thought the killer had come back to finish me off, that he’d decided I might have seen him … Well, I heard you go into the cabin, and I was so goddamn mad I was gonna get the son of a bitch—”

  “But it was me,” Challis said.

  “And you tried to kill me.” She pouted.

  “You’re doing a lousy Mary Tyler Moore—”

  “Bullshit!”

  He kissed her. He couldn’t help himself. She laughed.

  But Jack Donovan wasn’t smelling any better.

  Whoever had killed him had been conducting a search when Morgan had burst in on him. One drawer ha
d been emptied on the desktop and then flung into a corner, where it lay with one wooden side split. Another drawer had been pulled out a few inches and left there. A bookcase stood empty, the books heaped beside it. As Challis inspected the scene, he was amazed he hadn’t noticed it all before.

  They’d been rummaging for ten minutes when Challis yanked the bottom-left-hand drawer open and sighed.

  “Don’t despair,” she said. “I found The Magic Lantern, by Robert Cafson. Maybe Jack wasn’t so bad after all.”

  “No, not despair. But at this very moment a dead man’s Topsider shoe is touching my foot, I can smell the part of him that’s on the wall, and I’m looking into yet another drawer full of astrology garbage.”

  “What sign are you?” She was working hard at not throwing up in the rocking, overheated, awful room.

  “Slippery when wet. No kidding, look at all this—my God, is everybody crazy out here?”

  “Everybody’s looking for an answer, that’s all.”

  “Well,” he said, shuffling the astrological charts through his hands, trying to keep his fingertips off them, “what the hell is this?” He poked his hand toward the bottom of the drawer built deep for filing. “Goldie never read these goddamned charts,” he muttered, “and it doesn’t look like old dead Jack did either. … My God, I’m getting my second wind—lookie here!” He stood up too quickly, half-blacked-out. He was holding a stack of four leather-and-cloth bound books, light green cloth with black leather corners and spines, the word “RECORD” stamped on each cover. “Eureka! Kay Roth lives.” He flipped open the book on top. Page after page of spidery penmanship in faded green ink, old-fashioned penmanship, disciplined and utterly out of joint with the 1970’s. He thought: God love her, she’s better off dead. …

  Watching the blur of the Mercedes’ red taillights, he felt like an astronaut left forever on the far side of a dark planet in the wrong galaxy. The rain fell steadily, the drip from the torn Mustang top drummed steadily, and the wind came in gusts from the Pacific, swirled in the muddy canyons where the night was dark, impenetrable, like the inside of a box. The smell of the earth rode on the wind. One windshield wiper was coming apart and beginning to clack against its mooring. He turned the radio on to keep himself awake, and it worked reasonably well, like propping his eyelids open with toothpicks.

  It was tough enough to think, even harder to rethink the situation. A couple of hours before, he’d been certain, morally certain, that Jack Donovan had killed Goldie. Now, with Donovan murdered, had that conclusion changed? Not necessarily. Two murders in a tight group of people made you think of a single killer! Somebody who killed somebody else, then had to go on killing to protect himself. But this was all different; the tidiness was absent … the reality was such a catch-all of motives, of egocentricity, of callousness, of dissimilar people with their own very personal and, as it happened, unique concerns. Remember, Toby old son, remember all those potential murderers.

  Who might have killed her?

  Donovan could have killed her to stop publication of the diaries, to keep from having to face the prospect of Tully Hacker shooting his eyes out to teach him a lesson.

  Okay, Challis, dive into the pit. Aaron Roth could—repeat, could—have killed his daughter to keep his diaries private. He wanted it all forgotten, as if Kay had never lived. But, Jesus, murdering your daughter because you had trouble with a crazy wife? That one just won’t hang together.

  A beach bum, one of her pickups, as Aaron had suggested … come on, youse guys, get in line here, step right up. …

  So who might have killed Donovan? Aaron? But Aaron didn’t have the balls to kill a mean, aggressive heel like Donovan. Did he? And why would he kill Donovan, anyway? As long as Goldie was dead, she wasn’t going to go to another publisher—and Donovan had his million, so he wasn’t going to back out on the deal, not with Tully there, waiting to do the Roths’ dirty work. So who else? There it was, the untidiness of reality.

  Morgan, even with her apparent motive, hadn’t killed him: he couldn’t believe that, though her explanation of why she’d gone to the boat didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Good Christ, what was the matter with him? Morgan had saved him, she was the only friend he had, she’d even believed him when he told her that he hadn’t done it … and she’d been helpless with his hands tightening around her throat. … But why had she befriended him on the mountain? What was in it for her? The worm of unreason gnawed determinedly on one hemisphere or the other.

  So who else could have slipped the big sleep to the Irishman? Vito Laggiardi? You couldn’t have a pile of steaming shit without drawing flies and guys like Vito Laggiardi. …

  He watched Morgan pull into her driveway, and he went on past, around the curve of the canyon road, parked under a dripping eucalyptus. He walked through the rain back to her house. He could smell the mud and thought he heard the hillside trying to break loose.

  20

  CHALLIS WAS BEGINNING TO THINK the night would never end.

  Morgan brewed strong coffee, lit a couple of half-burned logs in the fireplace, and they settled down on the floor with a low table between them, the fire popping like a minor Central American rebellion. She put some Nate ’n’ Al’s cheesecake on a platter with forks. Challis picked up the first volume of diaries and began to read.

  After an hour’s reading he finished his second cup of coffee, licked the crumbs from his lower lip, and stared at Morgan Dyer. She sat looking into the fire, which was burning low. Rain ran down the chimney walls, hissed in the embers. Dark circles were growing beneath her eyes, and the lines and dimples at the corners of her mouth were cut deeper, her age showing through. She had the kind of long, lean face and regular features, the high eyebrows and cheekbones, the long nose and wide mouth that looked even better, more defined when she was tired or underweight or without makeup.

  Watching her, his tired mind reeling, he listened to a few phrases of Ella Fitzgerald singing “It Had To Be You.” His body ached and his eyes burned from tiredness, from reading page after page of the faint green script.

  Challis said, “Somebody was lying to somebody.” He sneezed into a paper napkin that bore a gilt inscription, “Welcome Home.”

  “Aaron is the villain of these diaries,” she said slowly, carefully laying out the architecture of her thoughts. “Not Kay. Accepting the fact that these are her diaries, her view of events, even with that you get the feeling that this is a record of the truth … she wasn’t writing it as a defense, it wasn’t for anyone else to read, there’s nothing we’ve read that sounds like she’s making a case for herself. She’s unsparing of herself, in fact … but it’s Aaron who … Oh, shit, I feel like crying, I’m that close … it’s such a sad story … these people, they had everything, I mean everything, Toby. How did they get so fucked up?” She brushed a shaking fingertip beneath her eye, looked intently at the fire.

  “Kay was doomed from the beginning, or so it seems to me at four o’clock in the morning of what has become a very bizarre lifetime.”

  “Still, when she married Aaron, there must have been a feeling of hope, a new life. She was only twenty years old … then the baby, Aaron coming out of the war all right …”

  “She’d have been better off if Aaron had gotten killed,” Challis said with a sudden rush of feeling. “Kay would have been better off, Goldie wouldn’t have had a father to spend her life hating … all of our lives would have gone a different way. I’d never have met Goldie if her father hadn’t been Aaron Roth of Maximus. Yeah, why didn’t some Jap kill the son of a bitch? Would have made the war worthwhile—so, what have we got on Aaron at this point?”

  Morgan pulled a legal pad toward her and started jotting down the indictment.

  “The customary movie-mogul infidelities,” she said. “No big deal, but he flaunted them, hurt her … women who worked for him on the one hand, women Kay knew on the other.”

  “Check.”

  “Then the business end of things—she saw what h
e did and she couldn’t believe it.”

  “How much did he take?”

  “She says he embezzled half a million dollars from Maximus … from his father.”

  “And apparently kept it quiet,” Challis said. “Can you imagine, stealing that kind of money from Solomon Roth and having to keep him from finding out.”

  Morgan picked up one of the diaries and opened it to a shred of legal-pad paper used as a bookmark. She read:

  A. and I had another terrible slugfest last night at Draycott’s. Arthur D. actually held him back or I think he’d have done an honestogod Joe Louis on me. Penny took me out by the pool house and asked me if A. had started drinking—would that he had! I had a good cry and then P. & I went for a midnight horseback ride—when we got back I was calmed down and A. had taken the Rolls and left, apparently sputtering to Arthur that if he, Art, wanted me for a loan-out he could have me, but only on a permanent live-in basis. Etc. Lots of obscene suggestions about what I’m best at. Charming. I stayed the night and tried to think it out, listening to the horses snorting in the stable. Read some Robert Benchley but couldn’t keep my mind on it. Why did Aaron tell me about taking the money? I’ll never understand that—if he’d wanted aid and comfort, I’d have supplied it gladly. But no, not him! He told me, then acts as if it’s my fault. Sometimes I think he could kill me just because he told me about the money. Life called us and wants to come to our next party! Quel joke!

  Morgan pushed her reading glasses down her nose and blinked, looked at Challis. “She was twenty-six when she wrote that. Now, we move ahead just a few months …” She flipped to the next bookmark, adjusted her glasses, and began reading again:

  A. got hysterical again last night—typical for the day he gets home from New York. When he’s hysterical and sobbing, he always tells me the things he later hates me for knowing. I finally know why he took the money from Maximus—gambling. I suppose I should be glad it wasn’t for presents for his girlfriends, but I’m not sure I really care anymore. Anyway, he owed some shady character in New York a lot of money, and I’d swear it had something to do with basketball games. Hard to believe. I know more about basketball than Aaron does, but when I told him that, he said you don’t have to know anything about basketball if the game is fixed! Suppose he’s right about that. He wants me to make another picture soon. We need the money, he says. How can that be?