Hollywood Gothic (14 page)

“Next thing it’ll be Jerry Brown,” Artie growled. “Go on, go on.” He had barely looked at Challis, had kept looking on down the line of cars to assess the night’s work still ahead. Challis goosed the Mustang ahead, wormed his way through the other cars, trucks, and swarming bodies. Bodies in raincoats, sweatshirts, jogging outfits, blue jeans, swimming trunks, bodies soaked through, caked with sand and mud, hair plastered to skulls, hands holding shovels, rakes, and plastic pitchers of Bloody Marys. There were people he knew, others he recognized, dozens of strangers pressed into service, even some gawkers looking for the chance to help a star bail out the dining room.

He drove past the back of his beach house and parked about fifty yards farther on, against Bernie Provo’s hedge and out of the way. He stood under the overhang from Bernie’s garage and watched the manic swirl of activity. Lights were on everywhere, glowing through the rain, making it look like smoke. Fog blew in, filled the areas between the houses, swirled in the rain. No one paid any attention to him.

The beach house was both familiar and frightening. The place where Goldie, who didn’t deserve her fate, whatever she was, whatever she had done, had been beaten until she was dead. He felt the unmistakable flutter of the willies in his belly and chest, the tightening; he walked numbly, slowly, in the general flurry of activity, bumped and jostled by the crowds of sandbaggers. A movie star he’d known for years walked past in Levi’s cutoffs and a poncho, sipping from a can of Coors: no flicker of recognition.

He pushed the gate in the white fence open and walked along the side of the garage. At the end of the garage he reached for the key on the ledge above the door frame. It was still there, untouched all these months. Rounding the side of the house, flat-roofed and soaked and dark, he caught the full force of the wind and spray from the exploding white surf, mixing with the hard rain. The beach seethed with activity. There was a coffee depot beneath one cottage built out over the beach on stilts. Hundreds of people dealt with the sandbags in long lines, passing them along. A couple of spotlights threw the beach into long shadows, turning the scene strangely ominous. Shadows moved across his face, thrashed against the glass doors on the deck. He took a deep breath, fitted the key in the side door, and went inside.

The air trapped inside the house was stale, smelled of the ocean, and sand gritted beneath his feet. Pete had been right: he felt like the killer returning to the scene of his crime. It was here he had lost his freedom, last seen Goldie, whom he had once loved, whatever else had passed between them, here where his life had come apart. He stood in the hallway listening. Wind whistled down the fireplace chimney. From a great distance he heard the shouts on the beach. He was sweating hard and his breath hurt in his chest. Now that he was back, the psychic shock rippled through him, malevolent, mocking his puny grip on sanity. In his mind he heard things from other times, Goldie’s voice lashing him raw, “Eh, Pancho, meet Mr. Challis,” and her laughter and the dark, grinning, heavily muscled beach bum flashing huge white teeth at him. He saw the desk he wrote on covered with her cocaine paraphernalia, the electric melt point tester, the tray of glass slides, the safety razor blade, the beveled triangular glass flake plate, the mound of snowy white coke, the fourteen-karat-gold bottles and spoons and straws, the scales and pestles, the Honduras mahogany stash box—it all came back to him as he stood in the dark, as if the candles were flickering and Goldie was laughing, her head back and hair falling through the air like a rope, and Pancho staring, mouth open, teeth white as the cocaine, wondering what was going to happen next.

For half an hour he puttered about the house, looking for a clue of any kind to what Goldie had wanted to tell him: a pointer, the hint of a relationship or a fact, a crack in the wall of silence that sealed her off from his questions.

Rummaging through a cavernous lower drawer in the big desk, he came across a disheveled pile of Goldie’s old astrological charts. There had been so little order in Goldie’s life, yet she had been receiving the monthly charts without interruption for years. And typically she’d torn open each new envelope, glanced briefly at the contents, and left it on the kitchen counter for weeks at a stretch, or pitched it under her deck chair, or she’d drop it into the drawer as she passed the desk. The charts were like all the other California trendiness, and like a toy, once you’d laid out the dough and gotten your hands on it, it was okay to kind of forget about it. But it was in this drawer that Challis found, dropped among the charts, the thick red leather datebook for the past year.

Tiredly he sat down and spread the book open in the soft pool of light from the architect’s lamp clamped to the edge of the desk. For an hour he paged through the year, jotting down his own notes, copying entries that tended to recur or which seemed to relate to Donovan, or simply seemed to appear adjacent to notations regarding luncheon dates or conversations with Donovan. He didn’t know what he was looking for, he was just sniffing it out, hoping. When he was done—when he’d reached the last day of Goldie’s life and quickly slammed the red leather cover shut—he sat staring at his own sheet of foolscap, sitting in the familiar chair where he’d assumed he’d never find himself again.

Call Jack
—
no damned mercy!

Jack: What’s going on? Cut the bullshit.

Jack: Whose side are you on?

Jack: Why no action?
This appeared four times.

Give J.D. swift kick!

M re K?
Huge capital letters, traced, retraced, appearing twice.

Max. TV=V.L.?

Why V.L.?

LV=VL?

And on the final day of her life Goldie had made the final cryptic comment, underlining it several times.

TOBY—THE TRUTH.

He sat staring at the jottings, not quite noticing them after a while. The beach house was not a good place for him to be, it was too full of the past, and you didn’t have to be a genius or a shrink to figure that one out. He heard someone on the beach singing the Yale fight song, “Bulldog, bulldog, bow-wow-wow.” He didn’t know any Yale men in the Colony. Why would a Yale man want to live in the Colony? It made more sense that David Begelman thought it was important that people thought he was a Yale man. Aaron Roth actually was a Yale man. He lived in Bel Air, which made more sense if you dealt in stereotypes, and that was the only way to deal, God knew. The singer came closer, had a coughing fit, fell silent. Challis turned out the light on the desk after dropping the datebook back into the drawer of charts. He closed the sliding door onto the deck and made sure everything was the way it had been when he came in. He gave the room a final look, took a deep breath, and eased himself out the door onto the redwood-planked short side of the L-shaped deck. He locked the door. Below on the beach the work went on. The rain was blowing across the deck harder than ever. He was turning to go down the few steps to the path when he heard a sound—a cough or a hiccup—coming from around the corner. He went back instead of running, a decision utterly beyond his powers of explanation. As he reached the corner, he heard the sound again.

A large wet figure hurtled out of the darkness, knocking him sideways, back against the wooden railing, which caught him across the kidneys. He sank to his knees, reached desperately for the pain in his lower back. The figure, a heavyset man in a raincoat and stocking cap and pajama bottoms, smelling of martinis, rushed toward him. “Fuckin’ goddamn fuckin’ burglar pervert ghoul bastard.” His hands were balled into heavy fists and his feet were bare, caked with sand. Rain streamed down his face, plastered his thinning hair to a massive skull. “Get up and fight, ya fuckin’ fuckface coward!” He staggered.

Challis levered himself up, using the railing, the agony in his back easing and his brain focusing on what seemed, against all odds, to be happening. He turned to do what he should have done to begin with, run away, but one of the huge paws caught his collar and pulled him back down onto the slippery redwood. “A fine woman bashed to death here,” the man panted, tiptoeing at the edge of incoherence, concluding with, “fuckin’ asshole ghoul.” Challis pushed him back ineffectively and caught the tail end of a right cross on the temple. “Help!” the man croaked. “Help!” Challis’ hand fought for balance, found a red clay pot full of wet earth, yanked it up and swiped at the man’s head, cutting him off in mid-cry. “Shit!” the man gurgled. “Oh, shit … my head.” Challis leaped forward again, struck again, the flowerpot glancing off the great head and hitting the shoulder. The stocking cap was draped over a large jugged ear, and the nose seemed to be leaking from the first blow, but the light was almost nonexistent, ninety percent shadow. The man weaved on his knees, muttering to himself, struggled to his feet; they had changed positions, and he now blocked Challis’ exit. “Look out behind you,” Challis said, pointing. When the man had slowly managed the turn, Challis drove a fist into the midsection, doubling the man over, then straightened him forward over the railing and heaved mightily, with the strength of pure desperation, and dumped the gangly, loose-limbed body over the edge into the shrubbery bordering the stairway leading down to the sand.

Challis stood holding onto the railing, his legs shaking, his eyes wandering furtively across the comings and goings on the beach. No one noticed what had happened above on the deck. He gulped air, felt the cold rain on his face, fought the tide of fear and nausea. He felt as if he’d become a savage, the frightened killer the court had told him he was.

T
HEY NEVER STOPPED, THE MEMORIES
never stopped: Goldie would be with him forever, her face at once beautiful, taunting, seductive, remote, laughing, snarling, and distorted and frozen in terror. The dreams were always the same in the end, regardless of how they began: the sunlight fading to salt-smelling evening, the booze or the dope in the air, Goldie yelling to a pickup to come out and meet her husband. This time there had been somebody moving on the deck, a sound, heavy breathing and running, faces with frightened eyes. Then he woke up in a hot, sticky sweat, cold air coming in at an unfamiliar screen window. The sound of the rain was gone, and as his head and eyes cleared, he saw clouds of fog billowing beyond the gray rectangle of tattered screening. Slowly it all came back to him, and he got out of bed. Out the window, he stared at the motel’s courtyard with its gravel and scrub grass and shuffleboard courts.

The night before, he had checked the drunken man’s body to make sure he wasn’t dead, then had wormed his way back out through the Colony’s gates. He’d driven around the rain-slick streets until well past midnight, until the shaking in his hands and legs had quieted and his heartbeat was back to normal. He had tracked down a hamburger and a cup of coffee at Ship’s on Wilshire in Westwood, had sat in the window watching the rain until he caught himself, head down, mostly asleep. From there he’d headed down to Little Santa Monica and driven along beside the high muddy inclines shoring up the railroad tracks until he saw the Easy Rest Motel’s blotchy neon sign through the rain. It was a dripping white frame affair, an exhausted palm tree, twenty units in a sad courtyard built on the wrong side of 1940. An old geezer with a round pink face, smooth as a beach ball, and one eye gone milky with cataract was sitting behind the counter. He was reading a tattered paperback copy of
Anthony Adverse
while a pop psychiatrist on an all-night talk show babbled about premature ejaculation from inside an old cathedral-style Philco. My kind of place, Challis thought, registering with Eddie’s name.

Now it was almost ten o’clock, and there was another crazy day to face. Twenty-four hours before, he’d been lying on the floor in the back of Morgan Dyer’s Mercedes. It had been a very long twenty-four hours, and he wished he knew how much he’d learned. He took a shower and thought about it. Ollie Kreisler and Pete Schaeffer had separately offered him ways out of town, and the rest of what he’d learned kept pointing him at Jack Donovan.

Dressed, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the list of items he’d copied from Goldie’s datebook. Those clearly relating to Jack Donovan obviously reflected her impatience, the cause of which was utterly mysterious.
Whose side are you on?
put Donovan in the middle of something, between Goldie and someone else, a maneuver she frequently employed in her personal relationships and which made her less than universally loved.

But the rest of the notations had the look of an unbreakable code.
M re K? Max. TV=V.L. Why V.L.? LV=VL?
None of it meant anything to him. Nothing at all.

He paid his bill and drove east on Little Santa Monica, edging his way carefully through the thickness of the fog, turned right on the Avenue of the Stars, and parked in the huge lot wedged in behind the Century Plaza Hotel and Twentieth Century-Fox. In only a couple of years the studio had gone from being an ulcer ranch to the top of the industry with
The Omen, Silent Movie, Silver Streak,
and
Star Wars.
It was a miracle, of course, and that was what the business was all about. The miracles, few and far between, helped to make up for all the unbelievably tacky shit infesting the fabric of everyday life. He had breakfast in the Century Plaza coffee shop, smack between a pair of miracles, Twentieth and ABC-TV. And people still asked where they’d hidden the American Dream.

He opened the Los Angeles
Times
to page three and lost his appetite. The bearded face stared back at its disguised owner and the headline said:
“CHALLIS STILL MISSING.”
In smaller type: “Mountain Search Intensifies.” And in the story itself mention was made of the possibility that he had somehow eluded the search teams and gotten off the mountain, storms or not. He forced himself to turn back to the front page, which was devoted almost entirely to the effects of the continuing rains. He chewed a forkful of scrambled eggs and glanced around the large room, which lay in a rather somnolent valley between breakfast and lunch. There were maybe twenty customers working their way through sweet rolls and bagels and lox and coffee, and every damn one of them was reading the Los Angeles
Times.
He touched the side of his face, just to make sure his beard hadn’t suddenly reappeared.