“Kay Flanders. More or less America’s Sweetheart. Did you know her well?”
“Sure, I knew her. Kay was a star back on the Maximus lot in the days when Sol Roth, Goldie’s grandfather, was still personally running the show, down to every last detail. The whole show. Kay wasn’t quite as big as Garland and Rooney, but she was the closest thing Maximus had—she could pretty well do it all, dance and cry on cue and belt out the big numbers and push her chubby little fingers into her dimples and coo the love songs, and she was pert, perky, prettier than Garland, and came across as happier. But she was always in Judy’s shadow. Because Kay wasn’t a genius, and Judy was … but she was second only to Judy, and I think Sol was perfectly content with that. …
“Anyway, she was a star when Sol put Aaron to work on the lot, the old let-my-son-work-his-way-up routine that puts the kid in the executive-office block in six months. Aaron apparently fell hard for Kay, and Kay must have eventually taken a liking to him … she was a sweet, wide-eyed innocent, virginal and pure and all that stuff on film, but of course she was a real person, older than people thought, and she was very near the top of a very big heap, and it must have occurred to her that marrying Aaron Roth was a hell of a career move. So one summer, there was a hell of a wedding at the Bel Air mansion.”
“The Seraglio,” Morgan said.
“No, Seraglio came later, after the fire. They were married at Bella Donna, the one Goldie wrote the book about. Bella Donna dated back to the twenties, sort of an Italian villa Sol built for his one and only wife, Rebecca, long, long since departed. … Aaron and Kay had a very big, big wedding, from what I’ve heard. Sol actually had Fritz Heimrich, who was under contract, come out to the house and direct the ceremony for close-ups and inserts—this was the day before the actual wedding took place. They filmed the real thing, too, and the reels still exist. Credits, cast, everything. People used to say they were surprised that Sol didn’t shoot the wedding-night fuck itself. The irony was that Sol is such a puritanical old guy … he really is, always has been, a maniac about doing things the right way.
“When Goldie was born, the works—Maximus publicity … Simon Karr made sure Kay, America’s little favorite, became America’s favorite mother—whoopee! Kay went on making pictures, Maximus did their best to keep her changing with the times. When I met Goldie, let’s see, Kay was probably forty-five. She wasn’t well then, but I wasn’t told very much about her problems—hell, it was a very dark secret. She was making a mystery at the time, and they were shooting her close-ups through gauze, all that stuff. Freddie Nugent, the cameraman, said they were putting more Vaseline on the lens than he was using on his hemorrhoids. … I was on the lot writing a thing for Jimmy Stewart and Ralph Bellamy, it never got made, which is lucky for all of us, and I used to see the rushes of Kay, and you could see the decay, it was well past the beginning of the end … she was coming apart. The mystery only got release outside the States, and the difference between the Kay in the movie and the Kay I saw over dinner occasionally was scary … she looked like something had gone wrong inside of her and was eating its way out toward the light, like an awful plant. She did some television specials, the one with Danny Kaye was pretty good … but she just had that look, she was used up.
“And Goldie was completely devoted to her, all the more so as Kay began slipping. Her health really went. Goldie became a nurse, practically, and Aaron never slowed down a step, just kept working harder and harder, staying on the lot sixteen, eighteen hours a day. And she never forgave her father. Goldie’s the one who started the story that Aaron carried on a script conference with Tony Flyshaecker all the way through the funeral—the truth was he interrupted a conference with Flyshaecker, went to the funeral, and back to the conference afterward.
“Goldie started a lot of talk about Aaron. He made himself an easy target, not the warmest guy in the world, but I never saw him treat Goldie with anything but courtesy. Aaron can be the worst kind of shit heel, but some of Sol’s class rubbed off on him, had to, I suppose.”
“It’s a sad story,” Morgan reflected. “Typical though. Typical of California, of the movie families, they could call it the Bel Air disease. Families screwed up with power and money, and then people go away or die or something …”
The wind whistled in the fireplace chimney, sparks flew up, and a draft of cold air slithered across the hearth. The light coming through the closed draperies was dull, bleak.
“So I went out to the beach house. Got there about a quarter past eight, said hello to Artie at the Colony gate. Artie said it was good to see me, said he missed me … ‘Miss your smiling face’ was exactly what he said. Anyway, he waved me on through, and I parked behind the garage. I still had a key, which I wasn’t supposed to have, but I’d just forgotten to give it back to her. I had it out to unlock the door connecting the chain-link fence and the garage itself, but the door was unlocked—nothing unusual about that. That’s one of the things about the Colony, you don’t have to spend all your time worrying about locking doors.
“I went up the walk, around to the side door. The sky was dark except for a blood-red line at the horizon, and the surf was maybe three feet—I remember, because it was so damned good to see and smell it all again … in my mind it was still home, where I belonged. I stood there maybe thirty seconds just watching that deep red turn to midnight blue, it moves that fast as it’s going down below the horizon, then I went in the house. I called her name a couple of times, walked down the hallway toward a glow, a lamplight, coming from the main room—it’s just a small house, you know—I can’t recall if I thought there was anything wrong, I was coming down the hall and I suppose I thought she was out on the deck or making drinks … then I came into the familiar room where I’d done so much work and, shit, here it starts to get all blurry. The whole thing traumatized me, put me in some weird shock-corridor, nightmare-alley kind of thing … there she was on the floor, lying on her side, the arm on the floor flung up above her head—I wasn’t thinking straight at all—okay, I’d had several drinks before I left my place, getting up the guts to see her again, it’s true, she still meant something to me. … Christ, you’re getting the whole gruesome story, aren’t you?”
“I asked for it.”
“I remember looking down at her, thinking heart attack, a fainting spell, an accident. I bent down beside her, and I was repeating her name, and then I saw my Oscar on the floor just around the corner of my desk. It had blood and her blond hair stuck to the base, and it scared me, made my skin crawl. I grabbed Goldie’s face, pulled it around, and then I saw her eyes, wide open, staring at me, dry, staring, and I got something sticky on my hand and I knew it was blood and stuff. … It was perfectly obvious that she’d been struck on the head and was now dead.
“Then I think I heard something, some noise, a footstep, inside or outside, I didn’t know, and I grabbed the Oscar without thinking, it was the only thing close at hand resembling a weapon. My brain was climbing the walls, I felt dazed and crazy, but I know damned well what I was thinking at that point—I figured the murderer was still there, that I’d caught him in the act, and then the door came busting open and there were four cops all over me, guns drawn, and it wasn’t too terribly surprising that they voted me most likely murderer.
“If you recall the trial, it turned out that they had been tipped off that Goldie had been murdered, that she was newly dead, and they’d gotten to the house in about twenty minutes, and there stood I with my piccolo.”
“Your bloody piccolo,” Morgan amended, her wide mouth turning up just fractionally at the corners. Challis found this change of expression peculiarly reassuring. “Would you like a drink? Or coffee?”
“A Scotch and soda would keep me talking,” he said. “It’s past noon.”
“Good. I want to know what it was like inside the trial, with all the machinery whirring …”
“Bloody boring, actually.”
She got up, went to the sideboard, and came back with a bott
le of Glenlivet, a pot of ice cubes, two heavy squat glasses, and a siphon bottle made of thick green glass with some long-ago brand name almost worn away. She poured two sturdy drinks. The soda hissed across the ice.
“Hilary Durant was your attorney. How could that have been boring?”
“Hilary Durant didn’t exactly bust a gut. He was civilized, he had a big fee coming from Solomon Roth, and he thought I’d simply gotten a bellyful of Goldie, gone crazy at her latest excess, and beaten her to death. So far as I could tell, I didn’t have a motive, and I figured that once they got digging into the investigation, they’d turn up somebody else, somebody with a motive and opportunity, and he’d be the killer.”
“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.”
6
SHE 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 s
ay ‘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. …”
Hollywood Gothic Page 6
