Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  Hollywood Gothic

  Thomas Gifford

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media

  Ebook

  for Camille

  CONTENTS

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  I am not I;

  he is not he;

  they are not they.

  It ain’t a business. It’s a racket. …

  —Harry Cohn

  1

  TOBY CHALLIS LIT A CIGARETTE and tried to remember his lines. He’d been trying to remember his lines ever since that night in Malibu, and it was a hell of a job. But now was definitely the moment for a cigarette, eyes squinting against the smoke, jaw firm in a grim, heroic, existential smile. … It was a little cheap as actors’ tricks went, but that was the point. Cheap and easy, and it almost always worked. Not always: he was no actor, and he felt like a hybrid, a cloddish miscalculation, half Humphrey Bogart and half Danny Kaye as Walter Mitty. He tried to think of a tough little joke for the guards, something to dribble philosophically from the corner of the grim little smile, but that was where he ran into trouble. His script needed a damn good polish, maybe even a rewrite. Sure, a rewrite … beaucoup bucks, but worth it, a damned good rewrite by the best in the business. But he was the best in the business, Toby Challis was money in the bank, and he couldn’t think of anything funny to say to the guard. Shit, the main guy always had a wisecrack for the cop-at-the-end …

  He looked around at the dark, empty hangar: oil-spotted concrete floor, the smell of small planes, jet fuel, and lubricant and grease, the peculiar nastiness laid across the scene by the pervasive cold, dampness. The lights of the main terminal glowed far across the runways. The rain diffused the luminescence, gave the structure the look of a UFO settling down to swallow them all up and take them to a better place where the music was playing and the lights were bright and gay. … a place where Mickey and Judy had come up the pathway past the great oak tree and found the barn of their dreams … What a place for a show! We can do it, I know we can. …

  He shook his head, forced the unreality away. It was happening more frequently in recent days. He would be sitting in his cell, reading a novel or a magazine, and somehow he would find himself fitted neatly into a movie, never one that he’d written, but always someone else’s. One day he drifted off into Mr. Lucky and he’d have sworn it was all solid reality: the gambling boat, the fog on the pier, and Cary Grant spotting Laraine Day. … Another time, the mountain village in Out of the Past had taken the place of his cell, and he’d walked with young Bob Mitchum from the filling station to the café with the nosy waitress, and sat down, ordered pie and coffee. … While these interludes were wonderfully enjoyable, they worried him. He had enough sense left to know that madness lay that way, good-bye and into the bin, Toby old fruit. Yet, the years ahead, destined to be passed in a cell with a lidless toilet and a bed hinged to the goddamn wall, those years were psychically unacceptable. He wondered when he’d start screaming and not be able to stop.

  The rain had slackened somewhat from the morning’s feverish downpour, hung now like a fragile Japanese screen rippling in the breezes. The sky was a dirty, smudged gray and the big jets whined and howled like a riot at the zoo. The newspapers said the two-year drought was over, in its place a series of God’s little jokes, watery disasters, villages swept away, graveyards excavated, vast meandering homes dumped down canyon walls and disappearing beneath thousands of tons of mud and shale. Malibu was hammered day and night by the storms off the Pacific … that made him remember the beach house where he had once worked so well, gotten drunk far too often on fine Laphraoig, and discovered just what sort of woman Goldie was. … And he inevitably remembered her lying there, still warm, her blond hair clotted with blood and matter, and his Oscar with its special marble base on the floor not far away. The marble was sticky. There were a few strands of long blond hair glued to the stickiness, and he recognized the scene, when it came sweeping toward him like a runaway meat wagon, recognized it without hesitation because he had been there before, a hundred times. At the movies.

  “Won’t be long now.” One of the guards stood at his shoulder, a man of fifty or so who was friendly and matter-of-fact about Challis’ predicament. His name was Daniels and he had a brother-in-law who lived in Newport Beach and was a cutter at Twentieth, nominated for an Oscar once. He enjoyed chatting about the show business with Challis, ignored the fact that Goldie’s head had been caved in with an Oscar. “Lousy weather, either you got your drought and your Santa Anas, or you got your flood.” He lit a cigarette and frowned at the rain. “But we’ve got a clearance to go.” He blew smoke into the wind and coughed. “I want you to know, if it was up to me you wouldn’t have to wear the bracelets. Stupid. Where the hell they think you’re gonna go? Wouldn’t get far with that famous face—trial made you a star, y’know.” Challis smiled, nodded, could think of nothing to say. What was there to say? He was afraid, quite desperately afraid. Prison society: he’d seen enough television shows devoted to the inhumanity of life inside, the brutality, the bestiality. And now Toby Challis, a screenwriter with impressive connections and an Oscar, convicted of beating his wife’s brains into the rug, was sentenced to life imprisonment, open and shut. Toby Challis, forty-two-year-old white American male, sheltered until recently from life’s harsher side, was going to find out what was true about life on the inside and what was worse than the stuff you heard.

  The pilot was chatting with the other guard and the copilot. Unexpectedly he broke into a hearty, rumbling laugh and shook his head. The guard and the copilot nodded appreciatively. For an instant the pilot looked across the width of the hangar’s sliding door, caught Challis’ eye, looked away, his face suddenly sober.

  “Being inside—you’ll get used to it,” Daniels said. “Fifteen years, you’ll be out, a new man. … They got lots of books inside, movies, all that stuff. …” He sucked at the cigarette. Challis wondered how many times he’d said the same thing to other poor unfortunates, ax murderers, slashers, stranglers, trash-bag killers … the whole cast.

  “I’ll be nearly sixty,” Challis said. “Not so new … a different man, though, I’ll buy that.”

  Daniels nodded philosophically. “Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, I hope it was worth it to you. There’s always the damned bill to pay at the end. My father, bless his soul, used to tell me about the free lunch he’d get at the saloon … how he used to lament that free lunch, no free lunch anymore, he’d say. Always got the tab waiting for you.”

  Challis shrugged. What was there to say?

  “It’s not quite the middle age I’d seen for myself,” he said at last.

  Daniels flipped his cigarette butt into a puddle and ground it out beneath a heavy heel. He began whistling tunelessly, looked at his watch, clasped his hands behind his back. Challis leaned against the doorway—the huge sliding doors—and stared out at the rain.

  There was, in fact, a middle age he’d seen for himself. Not a middle age exactly, but a sort of time he’d thought of as an Indefinite Future, a time when he’d gotten through the clutter of problems and difficulties which always seemed to be littering the path, everyone’s paths. There was always
a piece of work to be gotten past: a screenplay which inevitably went wrong and required a fifth version, a sixth, to meet the approval of a banker or an executive’s wife or girlfriend … or even an offer to do a piece of junk for money he couldn’t quite refuse, for a trip to Australia or Romania or some other place he knew he’d never visit on his own. There was always something. There was Goldie and how she was going to be resolved: how the problems she created would finally have to be sorted out. But up ahead, somewhere, was that Indefinite Future he wanted, intended to have.

  It had always appeared to him the same way. A man wearing an immaculate white suit, a pale blue shirt, a white tie with a touch of cream in it, stood above a beach, leaning on a stone wall. The breakers frothed against the pale, smooth sand, and sunshine exploded like a rain of diamonds on the shifting surface of the water. Tanning bodies lay motionless on beach towels, and the soft wind kept the man dry, though the day was hot. He wore dark glasses. He leaned against the wall, watching the people on the beach, who never moved a muscle; then he walked away through the crowds surging along the pavement by the wall. The only sound in this faintly surreal vision of his own private promised land came from the furling surf, like the little white box that reproduced the swishing sound and which he plugged in and kept by his bed when he ventured away from Malibu. That, and from somewhere came the sound of a Django Reinhardt-kind of guitar and a song at once familiar yet not quite identifiable. When he thought about it, which was often enough to keep the scene fresh in his mind, he assumed that he was the man in the white suit who seemed to enjoy his surroundings but was somehow untouched by them: a calm, serene, uninvolved observer who was there, but wasn’t there, all at the same stray moment. He remembered an inscription he’d once seen on a sundial. Horas non numero nisi sennas. I count only the hours that are serene.

  Now, of course, the future looked quite different, and in a way it was all Goldie’s fault. Simple-mindedly, worn down by the trial and the blur of what had happened since he’d found himself staring down at her remains, he wondered how it could all have turned out the way it did. It was so remarkably unfair, and it made such a mess of the pretty, ambiguous, enigmatic picture in his head. The man on the quai in his white suit. …

  When the small plane was ready, they wheeled it around in front of the hangar door, where it sat impudently crouched forward on the fragile, spindly wheel assembly protruding from its nose. Rain beaded on the silver fuselage, dripped off the back edge of the insubstantial-looking wings. A flying cell. No escape. Challis longed to slap his arms and get the blood circulating, but they were pinned in front of him by the handcuffs: he felt the scream of frustration building inside him and swallowed hard against it, pushing it back down his gullet toward the unpleasantness in his stomach. He’d have given his Mercedes for a drink.

  “This is it, Mr. Challis.” A hand rested on his shoulder, gave him a gentle shove, and off he went across the rain-spattered tarmac like a small boy’s boat on a park pond. “Steps are slippery, Mr. Challis. Watch your head there. …” He climbed into the tight little cabin and settled in a rudimentary seat, where a guard buckled him snugly in. Daniels waved at him from the hangar doorway, flipped him the thumbs-up sign, and Challis tried to produce a confident smile. He didn’t want to worry Daniels. The cabin hatchway filled with the leathery-faced pilot, the copilot, one other prisoner who had been given an injection to calm him down, and the guard already on board slammed the hatch and locked it.

  They began to taxi at once. The turboprops whirred loudly and everything shook and they were hurtling down the runway, climbing away, with the crosswinds buffeting them as they gained altitude. A hole in the weather, someone had called it back in the hangar. Some goddamn hole, he thought. Rain smeared greasily across the oval of glass beside his head. He had never flown in a tiny plane before: for some reason he’d thought the state would provide a smarter aircraft for transport to what he always thought of as the Big House. …

  He closed his eyes and fought a new surge of claustrophobia, tightening fists between his knees, gritting his teeth. Better to drift off into the anesthesia of a movie playing inside his head—hey, you guys, what’s playing at the Brain tonight?—better than this intolerable, choking frustration. Could he cope? He forced his eyes open. Play Bogart. … He would have to look at the world and stifle the urge to shriek and ignore the handcuffs and the doors always locking him in and pull up his socks and cope. … But he had never imagined in his life what it would be like to be deprived of his freedom, the opportunity to get the hell up and leave. As the tiny aircraft pushed on through the shifting, changing clouds, he realized he faced a future of nothing but restraint. He supposed he would eventually go mad. Or go dumb, vegetable like, which would be even worse, though if it came to that, he supposed there wouldn’t be enough left of his brain to know it. …

  From the beginning, the flight had seemed like such a bad idea, had been so tentative, so full of jumps and swerves and little ups and downs, that he’d grown accustomed to it. The cloud layers had gone from light to dark to light and back again. The winds had swiped at the plane often enough to have become an almost unremarkable aspect of the flight. And his mind had been operating in such a pit of depression that he was, in any case, too far gone to worry about the weather. He remembered a very amusing novel he’d read in which a character beset by a gastric upset had spent his infrequent moments of lucidity praying for death. Challis appreciated the man’s state of mind.

  Which was when things began to go wrong.

  The clouds were suddenly empurpled, rich and dark like overripe blueberries, and the tiny aircraft seemed in his mind’s eye to have become a shaft launched at the tightly stretched membrane covering the fruit. The darkness grew deeper in seconds, and then they had penetrated the membrane, been absorbed into the pulp of the dense clouds, and Challis realized that it was snow swirling from the cavernous blackness all around them. The gale increased at the same time and the metal of the fuselage and wings cried out, pulling at the rivets to get free and go with the wind. The other prisoner slumped sideways, dangling forward from the seat belt, his head blocking the narrow aisle. He hiccuped wetly and moaned as the bottom dropped away again and then slid steeply for several seconds: the descent ended abruptly as if ropes had yanked them to, and with a gagging sound the man emptied his stomach onto the floor. Challis looked away. The stench broke across him like a filthy wave, and he turned back to the window.

  Without warning his forehead was slammed against the edging of the window as the plane skidded wildly to one side. Pain ricocheted down through his eyeballs. He was pitched hard against his seat belt, felt it dig into his belly. The guard in the seat across the aisle said, “Holy shit!” and with a cracking sound his seat belt gave way. He came flying sideways and slammed into Challis, pinning him against the curving bulkhead. Challis smelled the Tic Tacs on the man’s breath, feebly tried to push him away, thanking God the handcuffs had been taken off once they were in the air. For a moment they struggled to right themselves; then a swift bank to the left sent the guard sprawling backward into the aisle, where the edge of a seat back caught him in the ribs and knocked him to all fours.

  The copilot burst into the passenger compartment, his face white, his eyes swinging wildly from the doped prisoner dribbling a fresh geyser of vomit to the groggy guard who was swearing and grabbing at his back and trying to avoid the mess in the aisle. “Everybody all right back here?”

  “Sure, man,” Challis said, “this is great, just great, y’know?” He touched his forehead, saw blood on his fingers.

  The guard looked up, pushing himself to his feet. “Hey, what the hell’s going on?” There was no time for an answer as the plane dropped abruptly again and the copilot was flung back through the doorway and out of sight into the cockpit. The sound of static erupted from the radio beyond the doorway, then stopped entirely. The door slammed shut, flew back open, and the copilot reappeared. “Hang on,” he yelled over the storm and the creak
ing metal and the groans of the sick and wounded. “Little trouble, nothing to worry about … wind’s got us off course.” He pointed at the sick prisoner. “He’s okay, is he?” The pilot’s voice came from the cockpit, loud, unintelligible, angry, and the pale copilot disappeared again. The guard lurched forward, tugging at the deadweight of the doped man, trying to get him back into his seat. Challis strained to see beyond the blowing snow, but it was useless. How far had they dropped? It was impossible to guess. He leaned back, feeling nauseated. He tried to swallow, but he was too dry: his throat opened, closed, and he began to cough.

  “Goddamn toy airplane,” the guard growled, wedging himself back into the seat. “Can you believe it? They never should of let us off the ground in this thing … you all right? Your head?”

  “Scared,” Challis said.

  “Bet your ass, scared—”

  The plane plummeted again, more severe than the drops that had come before. Challis’ breath left him; he looked out the window again and felt his eyes widen. They had fallen beneath the clouds and through the thick blowing snow which mixed with drifting bubbles of vapor hanging between the mountaintops, and he saw that they were flying in a valley with densely forested slopes on either side of them. His view wobbled as the winds whacked at the stubborn little plane. Off to the side he saw a blue-gray flatness of lake, murky behind the snowstorm. The thick fir trees seemed almost black, and he couldn’t see the tops of the mountains: just the blackish menace of the cliff walls. The engines throbbed and the plane struggled upward, desperately trying to vault whatever lay ahead. They slid off sideways and turned slowly, back toward the lake and crosswise against the wind, which was trapped and capricious in the valley. The guard stared out the window, knuckles whitened against the back of the seat ahead of him. Challis was frightened, couldn’t speak. A downdraft swept them at the lake, a great paw of wind swiping at them, and he closed his eyes again. When he opened them they seemed to be skimming across the water, fighting for altitude against the great hand pressing them down, pushing them into the lake. Whitecaps rose like a bed of sawblades, whirring.