Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  Zoot Sims had strapped on a big horn now, was rocking on the balls of his feet, the bottom of the sax cradled in his groin, blowing around the edges of “These Foolish Things.”

  “The Mafia,” Challis repeated. “Everybody talks about the Mafia, sure, but talk and seventy-five cents will get you a cup of coffee. Right, Hal? My New York client is after something solid.”

  “Come on, what’s solid? Where you been, man? There ain’t no such thing as solid in this town, you, me, Fast Jack—we all cover our tracks all the time. It’s the way the business works, publishing, movies, TV, it’s the same everywhere, you know that. I can give you some of the shit on Donovan—no charge, believe me, just give me your word, Bob, you’re gonna make it hot for the miserable shit heel—but forget solid, forget proving it.” He poured half of the funny drink down his gullet and gave Challis a big, sour, mean Texas grin. “You want the shit for your client, Bob, or you gonna turn it down?”

  “I’m listening, Hal.”

  “He’s listening. Way to go, Bob, way to go.” He disappeared in a cloud of smoke, and the cough hacked away, scraping the bottom of something.

  “Is that office just a front? Cosmetic? Or is he really doing that well?”

  Buller lit another Lucky and took a long look at Zoot Sims. “Go back a ways. Last year Jack’s girlfriend gets herself murdered—her ex-husband got it hung on him, that guy that’s in the papers now, poor dumb sumbitch. Well, Jack’s girlfriend was the only daughter of Maximus Pictures, so I figure Jack was in pretty tight with Aaron Roth—you follow me? Okay. With the daughter dead and her old husband going over for it, Roth was suddenly all alone—now people said he and the daughter didn’t get along worth shit, but who knows? I ask you. And Roth and the old husband were supposed to have been pretty good friends, the guy was a screenwriter, worked for Roth at Maximus, the usual incestuous Hollywood number, right? So with one of ’em dead and the other in the klink, Donovan moves in on Roth … brought together by their grief, you might say. Christ!” He frowned at the remains of his drink and flapped his hand at the bartender, pointed at the mug. Challis shook his head, indicating he had plenty left. Zoot Sims had moved on to “The Moon Was Yellow.” Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in Gilda flickered in Challis’ head.

  “Donovan’s got about as much emotion as a rattlesnake,” Buller continued. “No grief, no nothing, but it was his chance to close in on his girlfriend’s father. What if Roth and his daughter hadn’t gotten along? Death heals all wounds, y’know, Bob, old fella, old shamus? Sure you do, you been around. You got a face that’s, y’know, been around. So Fast Jack sucks up to the Roths, Aaron falls for it, being a silly-ass movie tycoon with no sense at all, and I figure Maximus is now financing Donovan’s rag. An alliance of the grief-stricken, but Jack’s got ’em hypnotized—they haven’t caught on to him yet. Christ, Donovan hasn’t got a pot to piss in that’s not leased … the 450SL, the penthouse on Sunset, that goddamn yacht he spends most of his time on. Shit! It could all disappear tomorrow.” He tied into his new drink. The bar had sprouted a third eye. “Whattaya think of that? Make your client happy?”

  “Who knows what will make a client happy? All the answers and a bill that gets lost in the mail. … You mentioned the Mafia. I don’t get the connection, Hal.”

  Hal squeezed the last Lucky out of the pack and lit it, grinning, enjoying himself, innocent in a peculiar way, full of healthy malice. “This part of the story goes back to New York, and my details are sketchy. But the basics are guaranteed by yours truly. Somewhere along the line with one of his goddamn newspapers or magazines, maybe it was his scheme to do in-flight magazines for the small feeder lines—somewhere Donovan went in hock to the dude in his office today, Vittorio Laggiardi … a mick and a wop, they deserve each other. But guys like Laggiardi use guys like Donovan for batting practice, y’know? Vito’s probably got the acetylene torch to Donovan’s nuts this very minute, and loud screams are music to Vito’s ears—ya get it, Bob? I don’t know the details, but I know what I see, and Donovan is wedged between Maximus on one side, since they’re putting up the money for The Coast, and Vito on the other, because Vito holds a ton of markers. And Laggiardi visits out here once a week and he’s a New York hood, he hates to leave the Big Apple. … And there’s something about a new kid moving into a big job at Maximus, some kid Vito knows or likes or owns, I’m not sure. It could be Maximus TV, but I’m fuzzy on this, so don’t quote me.

  “But Fast Jack’s on the tightrope … so what does the bastard do? He fires Hal Buller. It’s like having a lousy day and going home and kicking the shit out of the dog. So, Bob, old buddy, welcome to what I know. I hope your client can use it. Tell him to leave it sticking out of Donovan’s back, okay? That’ll be payment enough for Hal Buller, you better believe it.”

  Buller was growing weary, resting his deeply lined, shaggy-browed head in the palm of a hand, staring at the three gardenias on the shiny bar. He subsided into a silence laced with heavy, rasping inhalation, the breathing of an overage, out-of-shape, three-pack-a-day man. Challis nursed the melting ice in the bottom of the cheap, fancy mug, watched as Zoot Sims and his companions wandered away from the stage. He kept looking at Goldie and Donovan in his mind, trying to get them and their relationship straightened out. Goldie was on one track and Donovan on another, and at some point they met, interacted, and Goldie began making all those jabs at her datebook. It seemed to Challis that they were not simply friends, or lovers: those notations were something else, full of business and impatience and pressure.

  Did Donovan know the truth she had planned to tell Toby that last night? And where, really, did Donovan fit into the larger picture—not simply with Goldie, but with whatever his Maximus connection actually was? And how many lives had Donovan actually led? As a gossip columnist/leg man he’d been instrumental in running Morgan Dyer’s father. In New York he’d sold some part of his soul to Laggiardi, and once those guys had a piece of you, you never quite got it back. Was Donovan really a new satellite circling Maximus? Had he jumped the fence around Aaron Roth: had grief, as Buller had said, brought the two of them together? Challis sneaked a peek at Buller, whose heavy-lidded frog’s eyes had drooped almost shut. It wasn’t worth getting him started again, but the grief-stricken union of Donovan and Roth lacked the quality of verisimilitude which distinguished good work from hack: it was tough to throw such a wild improbability past an old screenwriter. … But how did Goldie and Donovan have Aaron Roth in common? That would take some answering.

  Watching Buller slowly fall asleep in the dark quiet of the bar, Toby Challis wondered what came next. There was no reason Donovan would see him. What good was access to anyone else going to do him? It wasn’t a movie and he wasn’t a detective and he was confused, awash in details he couldn’t quite connect, and scared to death that someone would come running at him from behind a bush, screaming his name and asking for a reward.

  He paid for all the drinks, stood up feeling stiff and rumpled, and left.

  He went back outside into the encompassing grayness, where the wind was still trapped in the patio courtyard, thrashing the awnings and snuffling at his trouser legs. He went inside the hotel’s lower level. A man coming out of the liquor store had a fresh copy of the Herald-Examiner and the front page leaped at Challis: “WHERE IS THIS MAN?” Beneath the headline, a full-page photograph of his face, thankfully bearded, stared at the world. “Storm Coverage Inside” ran along beneath his picture. He went into the drugstore and bought a copy, folded it over, fished out a dime, and went to the bank of telephones across the hallway. He found the piece of paper in his shirt pocket and dialed. She answered the telephone crisply.

  “Morgan, it’s me, Toby you-know-who. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, you get the picture?” He swallowed dryly. “I need help.”

  13

  MORGAN DYER’S HOUSE CLUNG LIKE a misplaced New England saltbox to one of the hillsides rising wetly above the Sunset Strip. Gaping, deep wounds had been gouged from
the muddy hills by the virtually unceasing rain, giving the mountain range the look of something very old and decomposing. Somewhere underneath it all the great plates tying the planet together were shifting microscopically, building up to the one mighty, inevitable shove which could make her fine little house a traffic hazard on Sunset. The palms waved good-bye, slowly and without energy in the wind drifting lazily in the canyons, as he rounded the last sharp curve and pulled into her narrow driveway, stopped beneath the latticework weighed down with curling bougainvillea. Challis sagged in the driver’s seat for a moment, feeling the tiredness, the letdown that comes with the notion that you’re home safe.

  She came outside to greet him, smiling, her mouth wide and a gap showing between her front teeth. She was wearing faded Levi’s, a green tanktop, and no shoes, and she hugged his arm, watching his eyes. “Come on in, I’ve got a pitcher of tea—I’m mainly an iced-tea person, year round. Coffee gives me the willies. How are you? Are you all right?” She took his hand and pulled him inside, through the wide living room and onto the patio with Los Angeles stretching out below. “Just a second—and help yourself to the tea.” He poured a glassful with ice cubes clinking and followed her out into the backyard. The wind was picking up, smelled of rain. The fringe of awning over the patio, faded canvas that had once been bright green and orange, flapped in warning. She was standing by the small oblong swimming pool fishing for leaves with a net. Waves lapped at the sides, leaves eddying along the gutters. A tiny faded brown bikini bathing suit lay in two pieces beside a chaise longue. She squatted at the pool’s edge and snared the last clump of brown leaves. Watching her, Challis felt a strong sexual urge, the first in a long time. Worry, fear, jail—they had laid his sex drive to rest, but he wanted to touch her.

  “There,” she said, dropping the net on the lawn, which was long and silky, needed mowing. “Come here, look at this.” He followed her back to the chain-link fence at the back of her property, all but obscured by vines. “I’ve been taking crud out of that damn pool for two days, and the crud is gaining on me!” As she spoke, a gust of wind whipped leaves across the grass. “Look,” she said, pointing. Beyond her fence the hill was disintegrating. Several hundred feet below, a swimming pool was full of collapsed hillside. Several men stood around looking at the mess. “If we survive the rain, the fire danger will be all the worse next year—the weeds and grasses will grow all the faster and get just as dry. Dante would have understood.” She looked at the ridges of houses and streets layered one atop the next on the canyon wall opposite. “All the circles, ready-made, waiting for the fire.” She laughed. “Sorry. This is no place to be philosophical. Let’s go inside, the rain’s going to start any minute.”

  It was a small house with only one large room surrounded by a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen. The comfortable jumble of furniture looked like it had been accumulated over a long time. He dropped into a soft couch and took a long drink of iced tea, felt the breeze from the patio. She sat on a hassock and asked him what he’d done since she left him under the marquee at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  He told her about Ollie Kreisler and Pete Schaeffer advising him to get out, once, for all, and for good. He told her about the link between Maximus, or at least Aaron Roth, and Donovan, which both men had mentioned. He told her about the visit to the beach house, the notations in the datebook, and the fight with the man on the deck. He told her about the futile visit to Donovan’s office and Hal Bullet’s thoughts about Donovan and Vittorio Laggiardi. He told her that he didn’t know what the hell to do next.

  “Today, after I walked out of the Hong Kong Bar,” he said, “I felt spooked, afraid of being alone in the world with newspaper stories about me everywhere I looked, completely stymied about how the hell I was ever going to connect with Donovan … everybody’s ass-deep in their own problems, I guess, and not all that interested in me. You know how it is here—you’d think people would come apart with amazement at my showing up, but Ollie and Pete just sort of nodded, gave me their advice, and got back to work. I’m not blaming them, I don’t mean that, but my situation—which seems pretty damn remarkable to me—was just an incident in their days.”

  “But you’re only involved in murder and escape from plane crashes,” she said. “That’s not the business, it has nothing to do with what really interests anybody here, and they both think that what is happening to you is only an inconvenience, something that can be fixed, like a hernia. They think nothing of offering to help you escape, but the moral question, who killed Goldie and why, strikes them as irrelevant.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they both still think I killed her. They don’t seem to think it’s particularly important whether I did or didn’t, they don’t seem to care what Goldie had gotten into that would get her killed.” He shook his head. “I just don’t get it.” The wind came up stronger, the awning’s fringe flapped noisily. “And all I keep thinking is, once we figure out what’s going on, we’ll be able to see what Goldie wanted to tell me … and then we’ll see it all clearly. I’ve got to find out what she was on to. I owe her, for Chrissakes.”

  Morgan nodded soberly, looking at the piece of paper on which Challis had written the notations.

  “I can help you,” she said. “I can help you with Jack, for one thing. But, first, Vito Laggiardi—now, he’s something new to the occasion. How much do you know about him?”

  “Only what Buller told me.”

  “Well, you remember my former husband, Charlie Sharpe? Charlie had to do some checking on Vito for one of the studios a couple of years ago. Vito wanted to finance a movie and he owned a piece of a Broadway musical the studio was also in on. The studio was one of the few without a major mob connection, and they sort of wanted it to stay that way … for as long as possible, anyway. So Charlie Sharpe took a pretty close look at Vito. Tying him into the mob was tough, at least in terms of hard evidence, but the studio wasn’t interested in hard evidence. They just wanted the truth, they didn’t have to prove it in court. And there were plenty of connections which looked more than merely probable. And Vito had been trying to buy up something for a long time—something glamorous, something kind of high-profile-ish. Vito wanted some fun, was the impression I got. He owned a big auto dealership in Chicago, one in Philadelphia, and one in Los Angeles. He owned a shoe company in St. Louis. A chain of drugstores in Detroit. Real estate in New Jersey and San Diego. An interstate-trucking company. A restaurant in Palm Springs, a couple of apartment complexes in Phoenix and Scottsdale—that wasn’t fun, that was business. So he got into the Broadway thing, backed a couple of shows that went belly-up on the road. He tried to crack Vegas with a bid on a hotel and casino and came up short. Then he went back to what he knew and acquired one of the largest storefront loan companies in America … and tried to buy control of a chain of suburban newspapers, failed. Then a publishing company, failed. The fun things kept getting away. A team in the National Hockey League, no dice. Then he went after the studio Charlie Sharpe was retained by … and the decision there was that the only way he could accomplish that was if the studio management and the stockholders asked him in—I mean, this guy was being watched up close by the SEC and the IRS and a bunch of other regulatory agencies. And the studio said no, thank you, and he couldn’t really run the risk of pushing it … so Charlie Sharpe said that the only way Vito could get more than he already had was to either keep acquisitions small or go way underground with money that would be hard to connect to him personally. Charlie Sharpe’s conclusion was that Vito was a very, very big crook, the kind that is relatively safe from prosecution now but had better be awfully damned careful because Big Brother is watching.”

  Challis said, “And now he owns Donovan.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “And Donovan and Roth have become chums.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But we don’t really know. Remember what Ollie Kreisler told you about Donovan and my father? Well, Ollie was right—Jack Donovan is not exactly a day at
the beach. … Well, Vito Laggiardi is like stepping on a broken beer bottle. You said Pete Schaeffer thought maybe somebody killed Goldie to make a point? Look at these notations. V.L.” She made a face at him. “Vito Laggiardi lives in that kind of world. Where you sometimes have to make a point the hard way.”