Hollywood Gothic (8 page)

“Circumstantial evidence is usually enough to do the trick,” Morgan said. “I don’t know how many explanations of that I’ve read in my mysteries … failing an eyewitness or being caught red-handed, but then, you were caught more or less red-handed, weren’t you? I mean, so it obviously seemed.” She poked the embers and laid two more logs on the fire. Her blond Mary Travers hair caught the flaring flames’ reflection.

“Well, Arnie Pryce prosecuted; figured he had me, open and shut. Murder weapon in my hand … and he and his people set about building a motive for me, which is just what I thought they wouldn’t be able to do—not a believable motive, anyway. Which is exactly where I was wrong. Obviously Pryce knew juries, knew this jury, and knew what they wanted to hear. So he went to town on the nature of my relationship with Goldie, which, God knows, was a stormy, lurid business regularly punctuated by public screaming matches, Goldie slapping and scratching me, me occasionally taking a halfhearted swing at her. Pryce painted me as eaten up by jealousy and Goldie as a nymphomaniac, screwing and carrying on with anybody who chanced by and then flaunting it in my face. And there was any army of people willing to testify to our mutual nastiness and her sluttishness … so the point was that Goldie had been a bitch and I had been driven to kill her, never mind about the call tipping off the cops, which they said was obviously someone in the Colony who had heard the last argument before I killed her … never mind that the caller said she was dead, not getting killed—all that was immaterial. Well, Durant kept pushing on the telephone call, to no avail whatsoever.” As he talked, he was recalling the bitterness he’d felt throughout the trial, watching it all go against him, watching the evidence in his favor, which seemed so crucial, so telling, continually shunted aside. He heard his voice cracking.

Morgan said, “We can stop—”

“So Durant said that the police had taken the Oscar and clumsily smeared my prints and anyone else’s, including possibly the murderer’s—talk about pathetic! He got better when he tried to prove that I’d have spattered myself with blood from her scalp, yet there was no blood on my clothing … he kept telling the jury that all they had to see was a reasonable doubt, but the spattered-blood routine didn’t do it, either. Then he began the not inconsiderable task of trying to whiten Goldie’s reputation—what a joke! It was all rigged, of course. Sol provided the character witnesses for us, I swear to God half the out-of-work character actors in Los Angeles swore to high heaven that they’d seen us in a hundred different settings doing the lovebird tango—I mean, these poor clucks perjured themselves as a favor to Sol Roth. Of course, the jury could barely contain its mirth at this fools’ parade. The point was, the jury wasn’t any dumber than anybody else, they didn’t believe our people, who were lying, and they did believe Pryce’s people, who were telling the truth. Then Durant called Jack Donovan to testify for us—Donovan, for Chrissakes, her
boyfriend,
who actually said that they were just good friends, that we were planning a reconciliation, all kinds of pure bullshit. Don’t ask me how Sol got him to do it. … Well, Donovan was a big mistake for our side. Pryce chopped him into coleslaw in cross-examination.”

“It wasn’t much of a defense,” she said. Challis was staring into the fire. He was sweating from the memories.

“But what else was there? I didn’t have an alibi. I was there, I was holding the fucking Oscar, she was still warm. … Her behavior really had driven me nuts—I really said the things those witnesses said they’d heard me say about her … in my fantasies I’d bludgeoned her to death a hundred times. Hell, I’d have voted to convict—”

“Except you didn’t do it.”

He shrugged helplessly.

“Then somebody else did. Your only hope is to find out who did it. The system has worked its way with you, found you guilty of murder, and now by a whacko quirk of fate, you’re loose. You can’t go to anyone, because the case is closed, you’re a fugitive, and anyone who helps you is in big trouble. … Is that accurate, Soldier? And if you give yourself up, the case stays closed, you go to prison, and there’s nobody out here to do anything about it. So, hadn’t you better do it yourself? So what have you got to lose?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He was exhausted. The Scotch was hitting him like Merlin Olsen in his prime.

“Well, I know,” she said, standing up and beginning to pace. “You haven’t got anything to lose but your life sentence. What more can they do to you?”

“But I don’t have any idea how to go about it.”

“Listen, you’ve got me, and I’ve read all the books and seen all the movies. … Now, there are two key elements in all that you just told me—no, three. First”—she ticked them off on her fingers—“there’s the unknown stuff Goldie was going to tell you that would fix somebody, presumably Aaron Roth. What was it? Second, you say there never was any real investigation, which means that there could still be one … and third, who was trying to frame you?”

“Frame me?”

“The call to the police. Obviously someone knew you were coming, killed Goldie, tipped off the cops, and let nature take its course.”

“Christ …”

“You’ve got to conduct your own investigation, Toby.”

“Sure, with my face on every front page in California.”

Slowly she came and stood in front of him. “Think. There’s always an angle, a way to do things in Hollywood. Never forget that.”

S
HE LEFT HIM ALONE IN
the late afternoon while she went into Cresta Vista. He sat by the fire with a cup of coffee cooling beside him and tried to read. That didn’t work. He thought about turning on the radio, decided he wasn’t quite ready for reality. It was snowing again, and as darkness slid down from the mountaintops, he lost sight of the towering pines, the lake, the road. He tried very hard to remember how the innocent man tracked down the killer in books and movies. He thought about his own books and screenplays, but that was all completely different: it was all planned in notebooks and stacks of filing cards, and nothing was going to go wrong you couldn’t fix. You had a plan, you stuck to it.
And now for something completely different
—
real life!

When she came back, her face was flushed from the cold and there was snow in her hair and she was carrying a bag from the Rexall store. She hung up her coat and pushed him down into a chair at the round butcher-block kitchen table.

“Now, we’re going to work a small order of miracle here,” she said, smiling brightly. “You’re going to walk out of here a new man.”

The guard in the hangar had said something like that to him. He saw the man’s face, the apologetic eyes, smelled the oily hangar. The tiny plane was being wheeled around before him. … She was turning the hot-water tap on full blast, dropping towels into the steaming sink. She threw an apron over his shoulders and cinched it up tight around his neck. She put a scissors on the kitchen table. He started to stand up.

“Come on,” she said. “Give me a break, okay? While you were talking, I was thinking. I’ve got a plan that makes perfect sense, assuming you want to go ahead and see what we can turn up about the real killer.”

“We?”

She ignored his curiosity. “It’s your old face that’s going to be all over every front page in California … not your new one. Trust me.”

“I hate people who say ‘trust me’ and ‘have a nice day.’ I want to kill them—”

“You really shouldn’t say things about wanting to kill people, Toby. Coming from you, it’s not too terribly funny. Now, sit still and look up here.” She took the measure of his face, a comb in one hand, the scissors in the other. He shuddered. “You’re not going to be funny-looking under all the hair, are you? I mean, you’re not an ugly person? No chin, buck teeth …”

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”

She made an initial swipe with the scissors, and he heard the grinding of the blades in his beard. A clump of beard fell onto the apron. Challis closed his eyes.

“You’re the barber, so talk, barbers are supposed to talk,” he said.

The sound and the tug of the scissors stopped for a moment, but she said nothing. He wanted to know more about her.

“What did you mean about going to sleep as a kid with the sound from the projection room coming down the hall? How did you know Jack Donovan, and what was that about sitting on Solomon Roth’s knee when you were a little girl?” He jerked suddenly. “That was my ear … stick to the beard.” He turned to look at her. “You’re suspiciously involved in all this, now I come to think of it. I’m serious.” He frowned into her smile: she wouldn’t meet his eyes, kept her own gaze tied to the scissors, the comb, the falling bits of beard. “Out of all the people in the world, you come to my rescue—”

“Don’t be paranoid. There’s nothing to be suspicious about. Turn your head straight, lift your chin. I didn’t mean to be secretive certainly, but it was your story that was so interesting. … I’ve never been convicted of anything.”

“Maybe they just never caught you.”

“Anyway, I’ve always been close to the movie business. My father was Harry Dyer, the director … he worked at Maximus for a while, I visited the lot one day when Solomon Roth was on the set where Dad was working—that’s when I sat on his knee. I was very little. …”

“Harry Dyer,” Challis mused. “He had a very nice touch with mysteries. Jacques Tourneur learned a lot from your father, Preminger learned how to make
Laura
watching your dad’s pictures. … That must be where you got hooked on mysteries. Your father—I think of him with Dick Powell, George Macready, Tom Conway. And Milland did a couple with Dyer … I seem to remember that Harry Dyer ran into some trouble, something funny, in the fifties.” Should he have said it? That was what happened when you let down your guard and thought out loud. The scissors made their steady, monotonous clipping sound.

“Yes, he ran into some trouble. My father was no innocent. He knew the business and he understood the kind of price you had to pay to make movies at all, let alone good ones, but he kept on. He’d been a writer doing scenarios for the silents, he’d been a cameraman, he even did some stunts, second-unit direction, then he got to direct. … I don’t mean to sound corny, but he really paralleled the growth, the changes in the industry. And he did make some good movies,
West of Dodge
and
Hellcat Battalion
and
Pearl
and
The Man in the Fog.
But in the end, he ran into some trouble. …

“The problem with Harry was that he was a good listener, people were always unburdening themselves to him, and he’d sit patiently with them and listen to their confessions and buy the drinks. Well, in time, he came to know too much, and some people at the top decided something had to be done. I don’t think it ever really occurred to them that he’d tell anything, but he had to be put in his place. So they took him off a couple of pictures in a row, they let it be known that he drank too much, wasn’t reliable, none of which was true. Then, when no one else would hire him, these big wheels took him back, saying we’ll stick by you even if no one else will, gave him some crummy little stinkers to direct. But that wasn’t enough for them … this was at Paragon, of course.
Peeper
was in its heyday back then, and they really had the low and dirty on Freddie Hatfield, who was Paragon’s biggest star—I mean, it was bad. Not just dope and hookers, but chains and whips and boys and girls ten or eleven years old, and a kid found dead in Hatfield’s goldfish pond. It was the story of the decade, and the problem was, it was true. To avoid lawsuits, Manny Froelich at Paragon suggested a compromise. You give us back Freddie, and in return we’ll give you the accumulated dirt on somebody else in our employ. It wasn’t that uncommon—they threw Harry Dyer to the vultures. Freddie Hatfield, as it turned out, went on molesting and killing little children until he made the mistake of accepting Manny Froelich’s invitation to go fishing on Manny’s yacht. That day Freddie had his terrible accident, went overboard and was never seen again—sobbing and breastbeating at Paragon, super-duper funeral with an empty casket, the works. While Freddie is wearing cement galoshes and feeding the fishes out west of Catalina. … The lies about my father ran to the standard booze-and-broads stuff, and they kept him on a little salary, but he didn’t get any more pictures. He played out the string, going to the beach near the Santa Monica pier every day … he’d sit there and shoot at seagulls with a Red Ryder Daisy Air Rifle. And then one day they found him lying on his side in the sand, dead as a dodo, a big smile on his face.”

She stood back and regarded the last stubble of beard.

“Hooray for Hollywood,” he said.

“Well, that’s the show business,” she said, leaning in and gauging the shape of his face. “I don’t believe I can get it much closer with the scissors.” She took the hot towels out of the sink, squeezed them out, and applied them softly, wetly to his face. “How long have you had the beard?”

“Twelve years,” he said through the steam and towels. “Did you ever work in the business?”

“After what they did to my father? No, thanks. I spent a lot of time worrying about trying to revenge my father, but that was a waste of time. Or I thought so. I vacillate on the question of revenge. It’s part of my fantasy life.” She was shaking a can of shaving cream. Slowly she took away the hot towels and threw them into the sink. She stroked his beard’s remains with the back of her hand; then the whoosh of the lather and her fingers massaging it in. He smelled the lime aroma, closed his eyes, and relaxed again.

“Come on, talk to me,” he said.

“Dad left me some money, so I got a master’s and most of a doctorate in English at UCLA and Stanford and married Charlie Sharpe who was a bright ‘Hollywood’ lawyer. We lived in Brentwood, and I really did the housewife thing, a life of incredible privilege and no real responsibilities other than listening to Charlie and fixing Sunday brunch by the pool for him, his clients, their wives and ‘chickies,’ as they used to be called. Ugh. Bloody Marys, eggs Benedict, crap. This was before the Perrier period, just my luck, so I had drunks falling into the pool, writers, directors, producers, New York sharpies of every stripe and variety. This is how weird it got—I played so much tennis that my sneakers actually got bloody, like toe shoes … like ballet—can you actually believe that? Somehow, looking back at my bloody footprints on the patio, I realized that tennis didn’t mean all that much.” The razor slid through his beard without a tug.