Challis had seen her before.
The jangling woman in Jack Donovan’s office. She had come to warn Donovan, and he had brushed her aside, hadn’t had time for her just then. She had called the receptionist Marguerite, hadn’t she? Something like that … Challis had been that close to her, had watched her, and she was Priscilla Morpeth. …
“Mrs. Morpeth,” he said. Tully was breathing hard, clumping along on his bad leg, and Morgan was beside him, holding on to his arm.
“You know me?” She cocked her head and the wind picked at the hood. He caught a glimpse of the pointed nose, the bright red mouth that clashed with the coppery, henna-rinsed coils of hair. There was a glint of madness in the shining iris, but kindness, too, a crafty, sly kindness.
“I saw you in Jack Donovan’s office,” Challis said.
“Poor Jack,” she said, exaggerating the sorrow in her voice, drawing the two words out to an absurd length. Then she cocked her head again, smiled crookedly. “I was right to be worried, wasn’t I? There was no doubt in my mind … I am always right, invariably … who are you, young man?”
Tully Hacker stepped forward. “Mrs. Morpeth, do you remember me?”
She peered forward, her head and neck thrusting at them.
“Why, it’s you,” she said. “Hooker, was it? Something like that—I’m bad with names, but faces are something else. You were very kind to me at the time of my husband’s death, I’d know you anywhere, though you’ve gotten older. …”
“Hacker, ma’am.”
“Of course. But what are you doing here, might I ask?” She seemed to be enjoying herself, as if weird encounters in the night were the rule.
“We’ve been looking for you,” Hacker said. “It’s a helluva long story … but it has to do with …” He stopped and looked at Challis, then at Morgan.
Morgan said, “Herbert Graydon told us you might be able to help us … we need to know about your relationship with Kay Roth, then her daughter, Goldie, and it really is a matter of life and death.” She looked at Toby, said, “This man’s life depends on what you have to tell us … or, it may.”
“Death is all around him. Believe me … I have the power to know these things, ignore me at your peril.” She flashed the cockeyed grin again and brushed windblown red and gray hair away from her face. Rings, gold and bright stones, flashed; bracelets clattered up her sleeve.
“You’re quite right,” Challis said. “If I put some rather blunt, impertinent questions to you, would you give us the benefit of the doubt and try to answer them?”
“You want to know about Morty, don’t you?” She sighed dramatically, looked away from them toward the emptiness and darkness which lay between them and the city. “For thirty years I’ve been waiting for you to come, to ask about poor Morty. And now you’re here at last.” She looked back at Hacker. “You were kind, yes, but you didn’t want to know the truth, did you? Admit it!”
“That’s right, ma’am,” he said. “We just wanted everything to get back to normal … your husband shouldn’t have stolen that money. And what happened to him, well … he knew the chances he was taking.”
“But why,” Challis said, “why were you blackmailing Kay and Goldie?”
She cackled furiously, shaking her head. “Now, there you are, jumping to conclusions, just like the people who think I come up here to look at the stars, which isn’t the case at all. I don’t have to look at the stars—they move by immutable laws, I know where they are without looking … I come here to commune. But they must jump to their conclusions, that’s always the case. They jumped to all sorts of conclusions about Morty, and they were wrong. Now you jump to conclusions about me.”
“We have the canceled checks,” Morgan said quietly. Her face was damp with mist. She towered over Priscilla Morpeth. She seemed to be getting taller, Challis thought, unless he was shrinking.
“And why do you leap to the conclusion that I was blackmailing them? They paid me for services rendered, I did their astrological charts, gave them advice … I do that, it’s what I do … Mrs. Roth and her daughter were both very kind to me, they let me do their charts when I’d fallen on bad times. Morty’s money ran out, I had to live, so I went to Mrs. Roth and told her everything … my, my, it certainly wasn’t blackmail … she was a kind, decent woman, she heard my story, she did her duty, plain and simple.” She sniffed and shook her head. “Blackmail! The idea!”
“But what about Goldie?” Challis said. “She didn’t give a damn about astrology.” He remembered the charts, how she’d always thrown them in a drawer unopened.
“When Mrs. Roth died, her daughter saw her obligation to me … she acted honorably. And I did what I was paid to do. Look at the checks, you call that blackmail? That money meant nothing to them—and the world to me. I told Goldie the truth, the whole truth.” She took a few steps along the battlement. “She knew I had to live, and she felt an obligation—she was a decent person … but she died, too. Everybody who knew the truth about Morty seems to have died, everyone but Aaron Roth … and me. Mr. Donovan knew, and he’s dead. The Roth women knew, they’re dead … I used to worry about what might happen to me, but now it’s been thirty years. … I’ve kept the letter, though. I never knew when I might need it … it’s at Wells Fargo in my safe-deposit box.”
“What letter?” Morgan asked.
Priscilla Morpeth gave her a gimlet eye, a crafty smile. “Why, the letter that tells the whole story. … Morty knew that he was in danger, that he might not come out of it alive, so he wrote a long letter that explained exactly what he was doing and why. … He gave the letter to Herbert Graydon, told Herbert that it was personal, husband and wife, and that Herbert should give it to me if anything happened to him. So when Morty’s body was found, Herbert gave me the letter … and I knew I couldn’t do anything with it. It was no good to me … it wasn’t what anyone here would have wanted to hear … you heard Mr. Hacker, his job was to keep everything calm, not stir things up.”
“The story,” Challis prodded. “What was in the letter?”
“Oh, you won’t believe it either,” she said. “I know that, and I don’t even know who you are—”
“Please,” he said. “Please tell us.”
She made no move to leave the parapet, leaning into its embrace. Her eyes darted about, not crazily, but from an almost boundless sense of energy.
“It all began when Morty and I came here after the war,” she said, eyes alternately half-closed, summoning up the memory, and large, round, bulging as she watched for reactions. “He had met some movie actors in Cairo and Alexandria and Paris during the war, they’d hit it off, and it wasn’t just that he’d worked for Korda and knew about the business … it was the kind of fellow he was. He was a jolly good hero in the flesh, the kind of fellow the actors had only played on the screen, and they admired him, told him he’d have to find his way to Hollywood once the war was over … they’d vouch for him. So, we came here and they saw he got to meet people, and one of the people he met was Aaron Roth, and they got on famously with their war stories and what-not … Morty told me he thought Aaron was a little sweet on him, a crush, but nothing ever happened between them, of course, but Morty was used to the attention—pansies were always making eyes at Morty because he was such a dashing fellow, and handsome in a very English way, thin little mustache …” She cocked her head and abruptly remarked, “Seems strange to be talking about him now, remembering him so clearly—he’s been on the other side for thirty years and I haven’t spoken with him for, oh, my, ten years I expect, it was about ten years ago he began to fade away, he told me that he was all right, that he had faith in my ability to go on with the rest of my life, that he’d keep watch over me … and he’d be waiting for me when my time came to cross over.” She was almost whispering, as if she’d forgotten their presence, but then the white globe of an eye flew open and stared at them from the shadows of her hood, and she was back.
“Anyway, Aaron hired him at Maximus and set
him to work in the accounting end of things. Aaron put him on the budgeting for certain pictures, and just the two of them had access to those books. They’d go over the books every night, moving figures here and there and back again, cost-accounting, analyzing, and they’d go out for drinks in the evening after work … then Aaron popped the question! Could Morty use a little extra money? Because Aaron knew how to make some. Well, you had to know Morty—he was always looking for the easy chance, the angle, he’d positively come alive at the chance to work a fiddle on the side, funny money was always better value, he’d say, than honest money, money you had to sweat for … well, Aaron really went at it with a spade and a trowel, laying it on, confiding, telling Morty how he needed some money himself and how he was scared to ask his father and his father would never give it to him anyway. What it boiled down to was, Aaron needed a lot of money to pay off New York gambling debts, betting on basketball games. There was an Italian, Vitorrio Laggiardi, and Aaron owed him something like half a million dollars. Aaron told Morty that he’d taken as much as he could from his wife’s accounts, that he was half a million short. He said he’d cut Morty in for twenty-five thousand dollars for a few evenings’ work on the books. Well, Morty wouldn’t hesitate a moment on a fiddle like that, that was his specialty, and what could be safer than having the boss’s son in it with him, and behind the whole thing, too? Well, Morty did it, cooked the books in the finest old Hollywood tradition, got Aaron his half-million and his own twenty-five thousand in about three months. But Morty took one precaution, he left the letter with Herbert Graydon. Because he knew there was a chance things could go wrong, Murphy’s Law … and sure enough, things went wrong in the very worst way, because Aaron Roth wasn’t quite the coward Morty had him figured out to be. Aaron killed Morty.” She flashed the huge eyes at them, gave them the gaga smile, watched their faces absorb the story.
“The letter tells the whole story, and it says if anything happened to him, it was Aaron who did it. The funny thing was, Morty wrote that if he let a punk like Aaron kill him, he deserved to die! And he told me about the twenty-five thousand in a safe-deposit box in Santa Monica. So I went and got it and lived on it for as long as I could, set myself up in my little shop, but eventually it began to run out … so I worked up my courage and went to Kay Roth.
“She was such an artiste, such a sensitive lady, she was calm and understanding. She heard me out and then took my hand in hers—Kay Roth!—and she asked me if she could help me in any way. There was never any hint of blackmail, not a hint.” She brushed mist away from her face, rings gleaming. Challis put his arm around Morgan and held her back out of the rain, which was blowing harder again. Tully Hacker’s face was streaming wet, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off Priscilla Morpeth.
“I asked her if she could find me a job, I’d have done anything, domestic work—Herbert could have given me lessons, you know—or maybe something at the studio, but she wouldn’t hear of anything like that. She said I had my own calling … do you know what kind of woman Kay Roth was? She said she would rather invest in my little shop, as a sort of silent partner, and she explained some tax aspects, and … well, she decided to do that her own way, sending me checks, and, well, I insisted on at least doing her charts. And when Mrs. Roth died, I went to her daughter, Goldie, the one that got murdered, poor thing, by her husband it was, and she was a strange one … she was so interested in everything, was always asking me questions about Morty and the letter, and I never could understand it exactly, but she was like her mother, they both just sort of accepted what Aaron had done to Morty. I couldn’t fathom it at first, but then I saw it the way Morty did, the way they did, it was just a part of our lives, it was all in our family and was nobody else’s business.” Her eyes flashed at them, head cocked, in a world of her own. But it was the world they all belonged in, and it all made sense. “But in the end, Goldie got murdered … and the thing was, she’d told me about Mr. Donovan and his magazine, she thought I could maybe write an astrology column for his magazine, and he said okay, I was doing some columns—that was why you saw me in his office—and I was doing his charts, too, and I told him he was surrounded by death and danger, I saw it, and now he’s dead and I don’t suppose I’ll be writing the column now … but I’ll survive, I have my regular clientele now, I’ll be all right, I don’t need a lot of money … I never have.”
She turned away, leaning against the wall, staring out over the domain she had just been at such pains to describe. From the look of her head, the angle of the thick, caped form, it was obvious that they had been dismissed, that she was communing again as if they had never been there. Challis looked at Morgan, then at Tully. The story was registering, but the reactions were masked. Even his own reaction to the fact that Aaron had murdered Morty Morpeth was imprecise, confused. His brain was trying to tie up the connections, read the final report, but there was precious data missing. …
They began to descend the clinging stairway. The shelter ended and the rain was driving again. Then they heard her call, and when Challis looked back, she was pointing at him—an eerie, dramatic gesture from an old movie.
“You,” she called, “whoever you are, be careful … I tell you what I told Jack Donovan—you heard what I said. Death, it’s all around you, past, present, future, it’s part of you.”
Then she whirled away and moved out of sight around the curve of the white building.
29
CHALLIS HAD NEVER SEEN HERBERT Graydon flustered, but he was somewhat the worse for wear when he bustled into the foyer, drawn by the sound of Tully Hacker’s key in the lock. Herbert slid his hand through the straight gray hair usually flattened against his huge skull and left it spiked off in all directions. He was pale, and the worry in his eyes was real. He wanted to know what was going on, and Tully suggested that he tell them what, indeed, was going on.
“Aaron got home a while ago, he’d had an accident out on the Pacific Coast Highway, ran the Corniche into a barricade at one of the mudslides—he said he skidded on the wet. Weed’s attending to the car, but Aaron hit the steering wheel with his head … blood all over his forehead from a cut, a bloody nose, glasses all bent … he came in acting like a madman, crying and staggering—shock, I suppose it must be shock …” His voice trailed off.
“Where is he now, Herbert?” Tully said.
“He and Solomon are in the billiard room—no, there’s no use trying to get in, they’ve locked the door and we have no keys.” He looked at Challis and Morgan. “What’s happening, what—”
“We’ve just seen Priscilla,” Challis said. “We’ve had a very busy day.”
“Herbert,” Morgan said, “you didn’t tell us about the letter.”
“Letter? I don’t understand, miss.”
“The letter Morty gave you to give Priscilla.”
“My goodness, the letter! I haven’t thought about it … why, there was so much going on, identifying the body, taking care of Prissy … I completely forgot about the letter. But what difference does it make?”
“A big difference,” Tully said, heading across the foyer toward the hallway. “The television room,” he said. “Come on.”
They followed him to the door two past Herbert’s. Tully unlocked it and they went in. The small room was windowless, filled with a faint blue glow and a console of five twelve-inch television screens mounted in the wall above a flatbed of controls. Tully bent over the switches and dials. Challis sank onto a small chair. Screen number one—all were black and white—showed the front door through which they had just come: the camera lens was shooting through a plate of glass that was rain-spattered. Nothing was happening at the front door. Screen number two: the hot tub at the bottom of the terraces, lifeless, with steam visibly rising like ghosts from the shifting surface of the water. Screen number three: the long room with the glass wall and the fire burning in the huge fireplace, casting the only light in the empty room. Screen number four: another outdoor camera, this one panning slowly al
ong the edges of the property; as Challis watched, the dinosaurs, standing stock-still as if listening for a peculiar, unexpected sound to come again, came into view. Challis blinked the tension out of his eyes. Screen number five: the upstairs library, where Daffodil Roth lay sprawled on a couch reading a thick book and sipping what looked like straight bourbon from a tall glass. There was a bottle of Wild Turkey on the table at her side. She looked soft in a white robe, a little drunk, her bare foot tapping the arm of the couch. Challis couldn’t look at her without feeling a pang, a note of desire, a wish to have it all go back the way it had been, however bad it had been.
“Sound,” Tully muttered to himself. Suddenly they heard Tom Waits’ recording of “Grapefruit Moon.” “That’s the library,” he said. “Every night she listens to that guy, hour after hour.” He punched another button, and the image of the front door disappeared, replaced by what was obviously the billiard room. “Okay,” he said to himself, “now for some sound …”
The camera took in the entire room from one end, and there, in a sharp black-and-white picture, were Sol and Aaron. They were standing by the billiard table in the foreground. In the middle distance there was a leather couch, a couple of leather club chairs, and beyond that yet another fireplace. Aaron was disheveled, dabbing at his nose. There was a streak of blood on his forehead, and his entire face looked like a piece of bruised fruit. His tie hung loose, like a dead animal, and his shirt was blotched. In contrast, Solomon Roth was wearing a dinner jacket, looked immaculate, as unlike the maundering old man at the studio that afternoon as possible.
“My God,” Challis said. “Sol’s a new man.”
“Yeah,” Tully said, “that’s the work of Dr. Feelgood … when the old man starts to run down, really run down like you saw him this afternoon, the good doctor pumps him full of snake oil, and presto chango, what you see before you …”
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