Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  “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.

  “I don’t mean to sound snotty,” she said. “I had friends. My friends … everybody hoped when we grew up we’d turn out to be Dinah Shore. Everybody thought about Dinah and Burt Reynolds. It got to the point where I wasn’t even disgusted by thinking about other people’s lives. Bob Evans and the football announcer, Steve and Ali, Rod and Britt … Who was your gynecologist, your hairdresser, your tennis pro, your gardener, your pool man, your stockbroker? Did you see Cher at the Right Bank Tea Room? Matthau and Marty Ritt at the races? Who was taking a crack at writing the new dirty novel? I began to care what Joyce Haber and Jody Jacobs were writing about.

  “And I decided to get out. All Charlie Sharpe would talk about was putting a project in turn-around, three-picture deals with development money on the front end and points at the back end, above the line and below the line, investors from Oklahoma City, negative costs, payoffs, and payouts and child-molestation charges … so I got out and Charlie Sharpe didn’t really notice because he was in Hamburg raising German shelter financing, but when he got home he found all the plants were dead. I just closed up the joint and forgot to tell the fucking plant man … he really was a fucking plant man, he was fucking Patsy Bloom and Cheryl Tomkins among my friends, in fact. … I also forgot to tell the tree man, the crushed-rock-and-gravel man, the lily-pond man, the tennis-net man, the bird-feeder man, who was a hummingbird expert of note, and the ant man, who was supposed to rid Charlie’s game room of a particularly hardy breed of ants who seemed to me to have joined us directly from the pages of S.J. Perelman—anyway, maybe killing the ants could be a new game for Charlie Sharpe. It’s all right with me.”

  She carefully finished shaving his neck, and he felt naked. She wiped his face with another damp cloth and patted the pale skin dry. She leaned back and looked at him, lips pursed. “Do you feel tough? Can we risk a mirror?” Her pale green eyes flared with her smile. She handed him a mirror. He peeked through squinting eyes.

  “Hmmm,” he said, slowly opening them. “Hmmm. I’ve never seen this face before … I was a helluva lot younger when I went undercover, hid my face. I suppose it looks thinner than it did twelve years ago. And I lost weight during the trial.” He moved the mirror farther away. “Christ, have you ever seen a more gruesome color? My face looks like I’m wearing a diaper for a mask. Take it away,” he said, handing her the mirror.

  “Yes, diaperlike is a remarkably accurate description.” She bustled around him, brushing against him; he smelled her perfume, her hair, saw the tiny diamonds in her ear lobes, admired the way her checked cotton blouse drew snugly across her small bosom. “However, we have this little white bottle of Coppertone QT lotion, which I’m going to apply very carefully to that dingy gray face and which will turn you into something resembling a Zuma Beach lifeguard. From the neck up.”

  For fifteen minutes she massaged the lotion into his face, forehead, ears, neck, wiped it all away, massaged another layer in. “
Somehow, you’ve got to come out basically the same color everywhere.”

  “You sound doubtful.”

  “I am doubtful, pardner. Stand up, follow me to the bathroom.”

  “I feel like a naked Frankenstein’s monster.”

  “You’re being born again. Just don’t dawdle.”

  He followed her, stood leaning against the bathroom door, watching while she prepared several packets of potions on the tiled countertop. He seemed to remember Goldie doing roughly the same thing.

  “Shampoo time,” she said.

  She was arranging a bath towel around his shoulders when he asked her what he really wanted to know.

  “Stop bouncing around for a second,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders, looking down at her restless, flickering eyes. Her mouth had a natural characteristic jut to it, the lips slightly thick and sculptured: he kept noticing these little things, and he’d seen enough movies to know that was a bad sign. Bad, that is, if you were on the lam and needed to walk down those mean streets by yourself and make like a tough existential antihero. “Just answer this—why are you going to all this trouble and danger to help me escape? Or whatever the hell I’m doing. You’re becoming an accessory of some kind, and dammit, I’ve got to know why.”

  “Are you done shaking me?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Bend over the sink.”

  He bent over, and she began to pour water from a pitcher over his head.

  “I’ve always been bookish. My mother and father always read a lot, books, screenplays, magazines, encyclopedias. I grew up seeing movies and reading. My father had the most amazing collection of pulp mystery magazines, hundreds of them, and I just sat down and systematically read them. And the people who used to hang around our house—Frank Gruber, Harry Kurnitz, Raymond Chandler, Elliot Paul, a bunch of other mystery writers—they all used to talk with Harry about plots and characters and atmosphere, to Lorraine, too, my mother, and I listened and I’d read their books and tried to understand how they wrote them.” She was working shampoo into his hair as she talked. “Then I went off to college, and one day I decided I was ready to write a mystery novel of my own. So I tried and tried, and it never worked out right, but I never quite gave up. I’ve been making notes ever since, cutting gruesome stories out of the newspapers, filling one folder after another. In the back of my mind I’ve got this terrible fear—that I can read ’em, but I can’t write ’em. Close your eyes tight, I’m going to rinse. But I do keep trying, one notebook after another. It’s the plots that usually go haywire. I don’t know how many times I’ve done a hundred pages and I begin to think something’s not quite right, I read it all again, and it hits me that I’m writing a book that Ellery Queen or Bret Halliday or Ngaio Marsh or George Harmon Coxe wrote thirty years ago and I read lying in a hammock twenty years ago.”

  She was squeezing water out of his hair, and his back hurt from bending over. He took a deep breath, figured that a man who survived a plane crash could survive a shampoo at the hands of Morgan Dyer.

  “Keep your head down, eyes closed. We’re just getting to the key step. Now, to continue my justification for breaking the law … and, of course, you’re not going to believe it. But this—your predicament—is a ready-made plot. You’re a mystery novel that’s come to life, and at the very least I can recognize one staring me in the face. So this is my chance to be a participant, even if I can’t write a novel. Is that pretty weak motivation in your eyes? I mean, you’re the writer.”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered into the washbasin. “How do I know? … No, I don’t think that’s why you’re doing it. Not really. But it’s probably more fun for you to pretend it’s the reason, and it’s your business. It’s all right with me—”

  “But what is the reason if it isn’t my frustration as a mystery writer?”

  “Revenge. You were talking about revenge …”

  “Hmmm. You’re not as dumb as you look.”

  She pulled his head up by the hair, and he faced himself in the mirror.

  “And I look pretty dumb.”

  “Put your head back down.”

  Two hours after that she finished cutting his hair, combed it, gave it a whiff of holding spray, and led him back to the mirror.

  With the beard gone, his face and skull had developed an entirely new shape, leaner, more sharply hallowed and defined. The tanning lotion had given his face a California-copper look, which he could see was going to blend with his nose and forehead, given a few more careful applications. His hair had grown from a dark brown to a sandier tone and by subtly shaping the hairline at the temples, ears, and the nape of his neck, she had completely altered not merely the color of his hair and eyebrows, but the framing of his face.

  “Be honest … would you recognize yourself?” She bounced around him, primping him, attacking stray hairs with a comb. “Be honest.”

  “No, I honestly don’t think I would recognize myself. I am a new man. I even feel different,” He was having difficulty controlling a budding sense of wonder.

  “Don’t forget, you don’t have any papers to show you’re a different man. So you’ve got to be careful. No speeding tickets, for instance, no getting into any trouble … but I’d say you’re in the clear as far as being recognized. We’ve got to get you some clothing—you can’t go tracking down a murderer in what you’re wearing.”

  “Oh, shit! I’d forgotten about all that.” He smiled grumpily at her.

  “Well, you need some tutoring. Let me tell you how to do it.”

  7

  HE WOKE UP IN THE early morning with the night winds still ripping across the lake, tearing at the windows of his bedroom. He’d been dreaming hard, and when he woke he was sure the cops were hot on his tail for the murder of his wife—only he was tight-lipped, grim-eyed Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, worried about the metal plate in William Bendix’s head, wishing he didn’t have to say goodbye to Veronica Lake. It took several scary minutes to get it all straightened out, and while he worked at it he clung to his blanket, holding it tight to his chin. The return of the lapses bothered him, intensified the unreality of the truth of his situation. But then, maybe that was the key to getting through what lay ahead: accept the unreality and play it like a movie. That was essentially what Morgan had told him the night before; she’d stressed that all you could go by in a situation such as his was what she’d learned from the mystery novels she’d spent her lifetime reading. Look, she’d said, this is the way they do it. He relaxed his grip on the covers and felt his heartbeat slowing down. He felt suspended uneasily between reality and illusion.

  He had a hell of a time recognizing himself in the bathroom mirror, and over coffee and toast Morgan emphatically assured him that he looked like he’d just come back from lying in the Acapulco sunshine and bore very little resemblance to Toby Challis. “The eyes,” she said, “we can’t do much about the eyes …” She shrugged; as far as the eyes went, he’d have to trust to luck. Finally she stood up. “It’s time.”

  She called the sheriff in Cresta Vista while Challis listened on the extension.

  “Jeff, I thought I’d take your advice and check on the roads. I’d like to drive into Los Angeles this morning …”

  “The sooner the better, Morg,” he said. “The snow’s supposed to start again this afternoon, but right now I’d say it’s okay.”

  “I guess everything went all right with the kids,” she said.

  “Sure, sure.” The sheriff sounded tired, harried. “Honest to God, Morg, I’ve never seen anything like the past few days. We’ve been going crazy since yesterday afternoon … the choppers got a break in the weather, went in, and found that downed plane … the prison plane, y’know? They found it just before nightfall, and we had a helluva snowslide between us and it about midnight. Worked all night on the snow, and this morning the wind’s too bad for the choppers, so we’re still trying to get there on the road. I’m telling you, I’m bushed.”

  “Can th
ey tell if there are any survivors?”

  “Pretty hard to see in among the trees. It’s amazing they found it at all, really, with the weather and all … but they didn’t report any movement.” He sighed heavily and made a slurping noise. Challis could see the paper cup and smell the coffee in his mind. “All we can do is get there as soon as we can. Well, anyway, they’re honking the horn for me. So drive careful-like, and take your time.”

  “I will, Jeff. And good luck.”

  “We’ll be all right. It’s those guys in the plane, that Challis fella and the rest of ’em, they’re the ones need luck.”

  In the garage, Challis opened the rear door of the green Mercedes sedan. The backseat was covered with cardboard boxes of books addressed to Murder, He Says, Bookshop. Morgan stood beside him, holding three wool plaid blankets and an old raincoat. It was cold and damp in the garage. He could see their breath.

  “Take your pick—the trunk or the floor. We can’t run the risk of your being seen. The mountain’s a small world, and everybody knows me. I didn’t bring anybody up the mountain, and I’d better not bring anybody extra back down.”

  “I’ll get on the floor in back,” he said. “Cover me with the blankets, tilt some of the boxes out over me.”

  It was a tight fit, brought a reminder of the aches and pains of the past few days. She drove with the radio on. His body seemed to absorb each bump and turn.

  In a little while she said, “Hang on. We’re just entering Cresta Vista.”

  When she stopped for a traffic light, irrational fear took over: he felt eyes boring into him. He held his breath. It took forever; then they were pushing forward. “The town’s full,” she said. “Everybody doing their stocking up while there’s a break in the storm. We’ll be out of it in a couple of minutes.”

  The winding, slippery drive curling down the side of the mountain left him clawing at the floor, his foot braced against the door. Every few minutes claustrophobia would set in, he’d begin gagging in the heat and the wool of the blankets; then a sudden swerve and he’d see the Mercedes hurtling off into the abyss, plummeting down to disappear among the pines, and he’d forget the heat and the wool and pray for survival.