Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  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.

  Outside on the promenade that tunnels beneath the Avenue of the Stars like something from the twenty-first century, a landscape of concrete with the Shubert Theater and Beatlemania on the left and Star Wars still holding at the Plitt on the other, he nearly bumped into an ABC-TV executive he knew and a PR guy from Twentieth he’d always known had coveted Goldie’s round, tight little ass. He watched them from the corners of his eyes as they ricocheted off in different directions looking worried about their fading suntans. They hadn’t even noticed his existence, let alone his identity, but it didn’t make any difference. He felt terribly obvious and exposed and jittery.

  The offices of The Coast magazine took up a lot of high-priced territory in the ABC Entertainment Center, a sea of chamois-colored carpet on which floated a fleet of Corbusier chairs, tables with glass tops an inch thick, Boston ferns and elegant, swaying little date palms, and something Challis thought might just possibly be hibiscus. Working himself up to a frontal assault, calling on the shades of Raymond Chandler and Marlowe and all the other private eyes who had trekked across all the carpets toward all the snotty receptionists in pursuit of all the villains, Challis plunged toward the gimlet-eyed blond. She had frizzed hair like a Boston fern that was not yet big enough to develop a beautiful droop; her fingernails were as long as piano keys, painted dark brown, and on the middle finger of her right hand someone had implanted a gold star in the nail. She looked up with the kind of blank, arrogant face perfected by girls of twenty-five.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Donovan.”

  “The line forms on the right,” she said.

  “Tell him it’s—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to show she wasn’t, “but Mr. Donovan is in a meeting and he really cannot possibly be disturbed. I’ll have to wait until he’s free. Take a seat, please, Mr. …”

  “Claude Smith, Maximus Productions.” He smiled at her. “I won’t take up much of his time.” He headed for one of the leather-and-chrome chairs, sat down.

  “He is all booked up for the rest of the day, you know.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Now that he was in the office, he began to wonder what the hell he thought he was doing, what he expected to pry out of Donovan. To begin with, he would have to tell Donovan who he was, and once he was revealed, what was Donovan likely to do in response? What if he called the cops? What if he had a gun in his desk? Challis squirmed in the chair. But everything in Goldie’s datebook seemed to point to her relationship with Donovan: she must have confided in him … he must have some clue to what she was doing, what she wanted to tell Toby. So, what was there to do but risk it? He looked at his watch.

  The magazine was only a few years old, and he’d heard that the beginnings had been hangnail and threadbare. Donovan had come west with a background in publishing, or so the story went, but he hadn’t acted as if he had heavy money behind him. In a way it was his second tour of duty on the coast, but also, in a way, he’d never really left after making his first stop as an ad salesman for a local TV station, then as a columnist’s leg man and small-time publicity agent, then as an agent at one of the big shops that eventually merged and became bigger yet. Back in Jersey and New York City he’d worked the business end of several magazines and newspapers, made a reputation for propping up incipient DOA’s. And then it had been back to Los Angeles, blowing his own horn for all it was worth. The Coast would be the magazine for the entertainment industry, for politics, for social investigation, the magazine that would tell Californians what their state—Donovan had taken to calling it “the lead-edge state, the place where everything happens first, the place the world makes a habit of watching”—really amounted to. It all sounded wonderful, but The Coast had been a sickly baby the few times Challis had read it—and then his life had blown up in his face and he didn’t see much of The Coast. Now, sickly infant or not, prosperity had come to Jack Donovan.

  On the wall facing him, spread from floor to ceiling, was a color blow-up of The Coast’s first cover, an aerial shot of the entire Los Angeles area all the way to the sea, which was a masterpiece of matching and joining dozens of individual photographs. Challis sat quietly staring at the various landmarks of his adult life, wondering what enabled the magazine to project such an image. Perhaps it was just the Los Angeles syndrome, the belief that a false front was as good as the real thing.

  Half an hour later the door opened and a bizarre-looking elderly woman dressed in a voluminous black caftan swept toward the receptionist trailing an overwhelming aroma of verbena. She clanked beneath lots of gypsy jewelry, bracelets and rings and several necklaces dangling a variety of amulets. Her nails were bright orange, not quite matching her henna-rinsed hair, which looked like the fuzzy halo of a dead dandelion. She clutched an ancient, cracked black leather satchel overflowing with papers and folders, the whole package bound together with a colossal rubber band. She shuffled back and forth in front of the receptionist.

  “I must insist, young lady, I must.” She sounded like Eleanor Roosevelt. “This is of the greatest possible importance to Mr. Donovan. I was up all night working it out, it’s terribly, terribly important.” Her voice dropped dramatically and the jewelry set up a cry as she drew a conjurer’s line in the air, the orange nails almost leaving a trail behind them. “Danger,” she crooned, “danger all around him … he’s off center, you know that … terrible danger. … It was all there last night, plain as day.” She turned to Challis. “You there, young man, can’t you feel it? Even here in this very room?” Her round eyes had a pinhead of light at their dark centers, pierced him, a flickering bird’s eyes, blinking like two camera shutters. “Honestly, don’t you feel it, sir? Ominous … oppressive forces working against our dear Mr. Donovan.” Challis began to stammer a non sequitur, but she rescued him by turning back to the girl. “He’ll want to know, this I assure you, Marguerite.”

  “My name isn’t Marguerite,” the girl said, surprised.

  “You seem to me to be a Marguerite. I knew a Marguerite once …” She interrupted herself: “Well, what does it matter? What does it signify? I must see Mr. Donovan, poor Mr. Donovan.” She marched, jangling, to a chair on the other side of the glass-and-chrome table next to Challis. Once her eyes clicked up at him, as if she were recording his presence, putting his picture in her files. “You have a weak face, young man. Prey to temptation, a wounded character—what’s your sign? I can help you—”

  “With all due respect,” Challis said, “I sincerely doubt that—”

  She had raised one clawlike, beringed hand, bracelets banging down toward her elbow, was about to say something, then stopped with her eyes refocusing above his head.

  A tall man wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit had moved quietly around the corner, presumably coming from the important meeting. His face was deeply tanned, fans of squint lines at the corners of his eyes; his nose was long and Hamitic, curved like an inward-pointing scimitar, and his small ears were tight to his skull and the tops were hidden by a fringe of gray hair cut short to look long. He looked like a Borgia prince waiting for the poison to work on his dinner companion. He was followed by a fat young man with skin the color of typing
bond and a mustache that resembled a scruffy mouse at rest. The fat man stopped at the desk.

  “Mr. Laggiardi has a meeting in the valley,” he said. He checked his digital watch. He set his briefcase on her desk, since the watch required a free hand to depress a button. In his dark brown gabardine suit he resembled a large mound of earth slowly drying on a sunny day. “Please alert our driver.” He lowered his voice, whispered moistly, “Mr. Laggiardi does not wait on curbs for limos.” The girl nodded at the sheer enormity of such a prospect. “Your Mr. Donovan will be joining us later. After we’ve had lunch … and if Mr. Roth should call, tell him we ran over a bit here and are on our way.” He picked up his briefcase and sighed heavily. There was an angry-looking boil on the back of his broad white neck where his collar rubbed at it. “Oh, yes, if New York should call us at this number, tell them to reach us at Maximus this afternoon—now, that should do it.”

  Then, without a word to each other, the two men left the office, the fat man holding the door for Laggiardi. Challis had the impression that he was witnessing the comings and goings of a group of actors. He reflected that Laggiardi bore all the trademarks of a New York clout-meister venturing inside the enemy camp, probably with an eye toward carrying out some mischief along the lines of looting, sacking, and plundering.

  A few minutes later a man roughly the size of a telephone booth appeared from the recessed corridor. He stood about six-feet-four, and Challis would have guessed his weight at 240. He was balding, with what hair he had graying and combed straight back from his massive sunlamp-pink forehead. He wore a Brooks Brothers gray herringbone suit with a blue Oxford-cloth button-down shirt and a striped regimental silk tie, black wingtip shoes, as if he had made this most recent trip west with a firmly held refusal to give up his New York uniform. He wore his round-faced gold watch on the underside of his wrist, secured by a blue-and-red wristband. He consulted the watch as the receptionist said, “Mr. Donovan, there are some people …” He looked across the room, his broad pink Irish face smiling, his small blue eyes twinkling like stars that had burned out millennia ago. “Aha,” he cried as he spotted the lady with the orange hair and the caftan, “my dear madame!” He enclosed her shoulders in the arc of his immense right arm, hugged her, and began walking her back toward the receptionist. “A thousand pardons, madame.” He grinned. “May the sun and the wind always be at your back, may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead, so forth and so forth, my dear lady, but I shall have to see you on the morrow. … Dear girl,” he said to the receptionist, “will you promise to fit madame into the schedule tomorrow? There’s a good girl!”

  The old lady began fumbling with the cracked satchel, catching papers in the rubber band, half-spilling them. “But you are in danger,” she dithered, “dire, terrible danger.”

  “You’re telling me, dear lady, you’re telling me!” He took her by the shoulders, met her round bird’s eyes with his cold twinkling blue ones. “At the moment, I am late for a couple of very important dates and then a party … but tomorrow we shall share a biscuit and a dram and you will tell me the worst.” He caught sight of Challis, nodded abruptly with a quick, phony, fading grin as if he had just noticed one of Laggiardi’s gunned-up hopsels left behind to enforce some odd, brutal demand. Donovan’s gaze passed quickly on, back to the receptionist, and the bantering, bullshit tone was replaced by coldness. “And, Jill, Buller has an hour to clean out his desk. Sixty minutes and not a minute more. … Ah, Hal”—he turned to see yet another body appearing from the corridor—“I was just telling Jill to start the timer on you, old fellow. You’ve got an hour to become a part of my past—is that crystal clear?”

  Hal Buller was middle-aged, portly, and sweating. His face was flabby and looked newly pale. He held a balled-up white handkerchief in his hand and his eyes were red. He said hoarsely, “Fuck the sixty minutes, Jack. You can have the crap in my desk. And may the wind always blow in your red face, you stupid mick bastard!” Buller pushed past. When he slammed the door, the room reverberated with the ensuing silence. Donovan beamed from face to face.

  12

  BACK DOWN ON THE FLOOR of the concrete wind tunnel beneath the Avenue of the Stars, Challis felt more invisible than ever. The whole business in Donovan’s office had been a farce: how the hell was he going to get to see the guy? Kidnap him? He couldn’t give his name and he couldn’t explain why Donovan should spend any time on him. He was an invisible man, no doubt of it, and the problems of getting anywhere with his investigation seemed overwhelming. He decided to drop in at the Hong Kong Bar for a drink and some serious thought.

  The heavy wooden door opened off the sad deserted patio. Immediately he was in a world of darkness and bamboo and wicker. It was a large tiered room where he’d spent several harmless evenings with funny-looking drinks, people who looked better in the dark, and some great jazz men and ladies. The long bar ran almost the width of the room on the right, and it was sparsely populated, looked like a set for an old Dick Powell tough-guy picture.

  Challis climbed onto a stool and asked for one of the funny drinks, which he knew ahead of time would be sweet and girlish and sickening. When it came it was wearing a little paper parasol and a gardenia and reminded him of a movie whore pining away in Singapore waiting for Fred MacMurray to shoot his way in and rescue her. It was that kind of day. Challis’ spirits were veering back toward a pronounced preference for life as it was lived on the screen of the revival houses, or the screen in his head.

  Down on the small square stage, a guy in a sweatshirt was checking microphone sound levels while Zoot Sims blew into a slender golden soprano sax. “Moonlight in Vermont.” His pianist wandered out, made a passing remark to Sims, who nodded without missing even the slightest, most sublime inflection. The piano player sat down and eased his way into the melody. Sims swayed slightly and Challis remembered seeing him in the mid-fifties, was intrigued by how little he had changed. Still the same massive head with the wiry, tight sandy hair, the chesty build, the bent knees when he began to blow, the prominent nose, and the overhang of his brow. He was playing “Sweet Lorraine” now, and Challis thought about Morgan Dyer and wished to God that his life was simpler, the way it had been right up to the night Goldie died, he wished he could call Morgan and tell her how Zoot Sims played the saxophone and maybe she’d like to go to the Hong Kong Bar and have some funny-looking drinks and maybe she’d find herself liking Toby Challis quite a lot. …

  A deep, thick, resonant voice steeped in cigarette smoke and rich bourbon growled at his shoulder: “You know why Irishmen never have hemorrhoids? ’Cause they’re such perfect assholes!” A laugh rumbled deep, stirring the gravel in Hal Buller’s throat. “Name’s Hal Buller, Mount Vernon, Texas, by birth.” He rested his elbow on the bar, hand extended, and Challis shook it, giving his name as Bob Roper—the name he’d used at the Colony. He’d known Bob Roper in grade school; he’d died as a graduate student in Italy. “Well, Bob, it’s been a turkey shoot all day long, and you’re looking at the turkey. You saw me get canned up there. … What the hell is that you’re drinking? Looks like a fairy drink—shit, I feel like a fairy. Bartender, one of these silly damn things for me, and another for my friend Bob. No offense, if you’re a fairy, Bob, no offense. Fairies are taking over out here. Well, shit, I got nothin’ against fairies, not a thing.” He nodded heavily, settling in comfortably against the bar. “I sell ads, Bob. Space, time, any kind of ads you want sold, Hal Buller’s your man. And I’m at liberty, as you know.” He lit a Lucky Strike and sucked the first smoke down to his toes. He coughed, sounded like a bullfrog at the bottom of a well. He held the cigarette between thick fingers, rubbed his chin noisily with the palm of his other hand. He wore a Masonic ring, diamond insignia on black. “You ever been fired, Bob?”

  “Sure,” Challis said. “Everybody’s been fired.”

  “Mmm.” He nodded. “But at fifty-four, to get dropped in the crapper at fifty-four, it’s gotta make you think. Texas … may
be I should head back to Texas. Christ, I can sell anything, not just ads—any-goddamn-thing, y’know?”

  “Sure, I know.”

  “Jesus Christ, you could put your eye out with a drink like this—little piece of wood in this umbrella thing.” He broke the parasol between two fingers and placed the gardenia carefully on the bar. “You a pal of Fast Jack Donovan? What’s your racket, anyway?”

  “I’m an investigator,” he said, betting a long shot.

  “Private?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, no shit. I knew a shamus once, poor bastard, couldn’t make a go of it, now he’s selling used cars in St. Joe, Missouri. Funny world. He was a shamus in Philly and then in Miami Beach. Damn near starved to death. Funny thing,” he mused, “old Clyde was a fairy. Nicest guy in the world, too. You starvin’? How’s business?”

  “It’s good if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.” Challis had written that line for a movie that never got produced. No wonder.

  “Well, you touch Fast Jack and you’ll get dirty, and that’s no lie.” He puffed hard, ground out the butt, finished the drink, signaled for another, and lit a second Lucky. He wasn’t even out of breath. “You workin’ for him? Or on him? Just like to know my footing, y’know.”

  “On him. Client back in New York needs a check on current activities. I’m starting from scratch.” Challis shrugged, the question implied: what can you tell me, Hal, old buddy?

  Buller’s new drink arrived and he took a quick sip. He broke the parasol, placed the gardenia beside the first. The bar looked like it was staring up at Hal Buller. “What do you want to know about Fast Jack? I’ve known him, what? Twenty years, I reckon. Twenty years … the middle of my fuckin’ life and I spent it with that miserable sumbitch.” He coughed, squinting at Challis through the smoke. He cupped a hand and drew the cigarette off his lower lip. “He fires me and then comes running down the hall asking if I need some money, says he could come up with five grand severance if I needed it—shit, I told him fuckin’ A I needed it, just send me a check. He will, too. Christ, I hope he burns forever in a fiery pit!” He let a laugh loose in his chest again, let it rattle around. “Fast Jack … you know what I mean, fast?” Challis nodded. “Well, he’s fast … he could throw a lamb chop past a wolf! Like old Bob Feller, the old Van Meter, Iowa, fireballer. You remember old Bob Feller, don’t you?” Challis nodded, remembering old Bob Feller just fine. “Well, he finally got the fast one past Hal Buller, and it took him twenty years to do it. I lasted twenty years, and now, pffft, the last fastball and he catches me flatfooted, pickin’ my nose, lookin’ at the third goddamn strike. And for what? The mick has to get rid of me because I went out on calls one day in a fuckin’ leisure suit! The mick hates polyester, coordinated shirts, white shoes and belts, but I had to wear that shit—my wife, goddamn pinhead, bought it for me, for Chrissakes. And anyway, I was down in Orange County calling on car dealers—man, they swear by those fuckin’ leisure suits down there, you’re an asshole if you don’t wear one.” He sighed and shook another Lucky out of the flattened pack. “So prickface mick bastard tells me it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, that I’m out of touch with the times, says—and I quote—he slaps me on the back, says, ‘It’s time to hit the trail, podner, it’s the last roundup.’ And him spending the morning kissing the Mafia’s ass.”