“My partner, Marjorie, has got everything going nicely, thank God. All you have to do is go in, eat some pâté and little doodads, drink some Mumm’s, and be inconspicuous. I’ll do some maneuvering and get Jack ready in my office—just don’t worry.” She touched his arm and smiled reassuringly. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Morgan was swept up in the greetings, and Challis did as he’d been told. The champagne was good, made him realize how hungry he was. He loaded pâté, which was topped with walnuts and tasted lightly of cognac, from a thick dish with a traditional rabbit-head cover onto a quick succession of crackers, wolfing them down. Terrifyingly, he knew half the people crowded into the store. Ray Bradbury was beaming expansively while a short man with wavy gray hair told him how wonderful the stage production of The Martian Chronicles was … Richard Anderson, tall and tanned, was shaking hands with a television writer who’d done several scripts for his two shows, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. “Good to see you, pal,” Anderson said softly, and the man turned to his wife: “Honey, meet the only man ever to star on two networks at the same time.” Challis knew them all, walked away.
“Look, Harry, I saw that blond’s test—you know the one—and lemme tell you, she’s table-grade stuff. I wouldn’t push hamburger at you, Harry.”
“Listen, Begelman’s the top of the iceberg, kid. I hear there’s a cool million missing at Twentieth and nobody wants to go to court.”
“Charlie, how many times I gotta tell you, mystery pictures are dead. Too much talk … people get ants in their pants, they want to watch a nine-point-two hit LA, hospitals coming apart, big fish eating kids, we’re dealing with an audience with a twelve-second attention span and you’re gonna have to face it.”
Irv Letofsky of the Times looked deadpan at a man laboriously drawing toward the end of a story. “It’s not funny, Marvin. Don’t you see that? It wasn’t funny when the Captain and Tennille did it, and it’s not funny now. It’s like my root-canal work, one of the least amusing things that’s ever happened to me. Sorry.” He smiled to himself as the man walked away.
Where the hell was Morgan? The crowd seemed to be inflating as if it were required to completely fill the room. The walls, top to bottom, were lined with shelves of mystery novels, volumes of true crime and memoirs, books about mystery movies, busts of Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe and Nero Wolfe, hardbacks, paperbacks, spiral-bound collections of film scripts. A display of pretend murder weapons filled a glass-fronted case: a pistol, several daggers, a syringe, a length of silk stocking, a heavy chipped ashtray stained with very real-looking blood. A slipper full of tobacco, reminiscent of Holmes, rested on the mantelpiece, nearby a London bobby’s domed hat. The space above the fireplace was dominated by a large movie poster of The Big Sleep.
“About a week ago I heard my house begin to kind of moan,” a woman said. “Death throes, I said to myself, moaning that came and went each day. Well, what was I to do? I couldn’t get a cottage at the Beverly Hills, so I wound up on top of the Beverly Wilshire … guess who’s my neighbor? Warren Beatty. I see him every day—my God, talk about the years being kind!” She cackled. “The house went yesterday, slid down the hill.”
He was thinking about another crack at the pâté when Morgan joined him. “Enjoying the party?”
“I still haven’t seen the novelist.”
“He’s sitting down at the table signing books, little white-haired chap … maybe you should sign some more of your books for me, remind me, will you? It’s time. I left Jack in my office, he’s waiting. I just said there’s someone who wanted to see him on an urgent matter. Alone. He took my word that it was important.”
“Oh, God,” Challis said.
“Come on, I’ll leave you at the door. Just go in.”
Challis opened the door leading from a quiet passage at the back of the shop into Morgan’s office. The room was simultaneously neat and messy. There was a large framed portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Paget, a replica of the black, stocky statuette of the Maltese falcon as it appeared in the movie, a statue of Inspector Maigret serving as a paperweight atop a stack of foolscap beside an old typewriter.
Donovan was waiting, even more massive in the small crowded office than he’d been in his own more spacious quarters. He stood behind the desk, half-turned toward the door as if he’d been inspecting the bookshelves while waiting for the mystery guest. His face was still the same shade of pink, a large head with the features glued onto the front, like a Magritte man. His expression was a compound of Irish wit, anxiety, charm, impatience. He picked up the Maltese falcon in a huge hand with almost no hair on the back of it, waved it toward Challis, almost like a weapon, but there was the grin in the pink face behind it.
“Well, well, me boy,” he said with a highwayman’s forced bonhomie, “Jack Donovan at your service. And who might you be, may I ask?” What was he thinking? Challis wondered. Why did he give off that slight aura of fear? Was it simply that he had things to fear?
“We had someone in common,” Challis said, closing the door behind him. The rain was drumming on a metal trash can outside the window. Donovan raised his faint eyebrows, tapping the black bird from hand to palm. “Goldie Challis,” he said, “you remember the late Mrs. Challis.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” His breath whistled between his teeth. “I was acquainted with her, yes—”
“I’m Toby Challis.” He held up his hand, palm toward Donovan like a traffic cop. “Don’t say a word. I am Toby Challis. I’m alive and well and I’ve undergone a change in appearance, but it’s me.”
“What the hell is this?” He moved toward the door. “If this is Morgan’s idea of a—”
“Stay where you are. I want to talk, that’s all.”
“Mother o’ mercy,” he muttered. The pinkness was sliding down out of his face: he looked like somebody had pulled the plug and he was emptying. He seemed to be shrinking inside his suit. He was clinging to the black bird as if it might keep him from falling down. “Look, I don’t … I don’t get the point of this. I’ve seen you somewhere, haven’t I?” His composure was struggling to stay alive. “Look, maybe you are Toby Challis, maybe I’m Eamon de Valera, but …” He cleared his throat. “ … but you killed your wife—your ex-wife, that is. I was a close friend of hers, you see, I was … shit, I want out of here!” He made another move, and Challis stepped between him and the door.
“Listen,” Challis growled, feeling the kind of anger which had bubbled over in the struggle with the man at the beach house, “I’m prepared to take that bird away from you and stick it up your nose. Now, goddammit, sit down and talk to me and stop acting like an idiot—what are you scared of? Why should you be scared of me? I want to talk …” He waited, hoping.
“All right,” Donovan huffed. “I’m not scared, get that straight, Challis. If you are Challis. I’m surprised. Christ, that’s putting it mildly … but I loved Goldie, don’t you see? And you killed her.” He leaned back against the bookshelf and put the falcon down on the desk.
“You’re wrong both times. I didn’t kill Goldie and you weren’t in love with her. Let’s be honest—I know far more about you and Goldie than you can imagine. And my only hope of clearing myself begins with finding out what Goldie was doing. For instance, finding out what Goldie was bugging you about.”
Donovan tried to laugh. “Bugging me? Goldie? What the hell are you talking about, man?” He shook a Gauloise out of its blue pack and ceremoniously lit it from a book of matches. He blew the smoke across the desk at Challis. He was getting bigger again, returning to his normal size, and the color was coming back. Pale eyes watched Challis through the smoke.
“She was bugging you, I know that she was, and I’ve got it in her own handwriting … she was pissed off and badgering you almost daily right up to the day she died. ‘Call Jack—no damned mercy! What’s going on? Whose side are you on? Why no action? Why no action? Give J.D. swift kick!’ Now, in my circles that’s bugging. Knowing
Goldie, it could have gotten pretty well intolerable, so don’t con me, don’t bullshit me—not a word of it. Just tell me what—”
“Holy Mother!” Donovan exploded, eyes wide, thick forefinger jabbing at Challis. “I have seen you before—you were skulking around in my office today, spying on me, no doubt! My God, what have I done to deserve this? What?”
“Skulking? I was waiting to see you, but you were busy with the Mafia.”
“Insane. Insane to even think such a thing, let alone say it. Jail has made you crazy, it can do that to a man, he gets crazy and doesn’t even know it, and it’s happened to you, my man.” But he wasn’t moving toward the door this time. He was talking, babbling, trying to clear his thoughts.
“Why not just make it easy on both of us, tell me what Goldie’s little notes really mean? Why not tell me what brought you and Aaron Roth together? We both know Aaron and Goldie were on lousy terms, and if Goldie had really had the hots for you—I know Aaron well enough to be damned sure he’d look down that bony nose and tell one of his grunt-and-groaners to squash you like something icky crawling across his patio. Now, the fact is, I’m in a position to be relatively unpleasant about this—so why not just help me? Unless you killed Goldie yourself, of course. She could be an irritating woman, I grant you. But, if you know what she meant when she called me the day she died and told me she had something to tell me, that she really had the goods on Aaron at long last—then tell me, and I’ll take my business elsewhere. If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to keep poking a stick into your life. Think of it—what if I poked in the wrong place and got Vito Laggiardi in the eye? Why, my God, Vito might blame you and have some muscle-bound nitwit put you in Cedars Sinai with a tube in your nose … and what do I have to lose? They’ve already convicted me—”
“The best thing for me to do,” Donovan said, “is to call the cops.”
“You really want to do that? Think about what’s really happening here. I’m not in this alone anymore. I’ve got a big-name reporter at the Times on my side, I’ve got a hotshot Beverly Hills lawyer wanting to get the case reopened.”
“On what grounds, may I ask?”
“Suppression of evidence, for a start. Nobody on my side found Goldie’s datebook, which shows in her own handwriting that I did have a reason to be at the beach house that night, that she was going to tell me something. The point is, I was set up … there was someone who wanted Goldie dead, who called the cops, who found me standing there in shock holding the gory fucking Oscar. … Go ahead, Jack, call the cops. Let’s shake it out. Ask for Detective Captain Otto Narleski, he’ll love it. We’ll open this thing up and let the guts run out, Goldie’s datebook, the frame somebody hung on me, you and Aaron and Vito—hell, we’ll all get our names in the trades, the Times, Jim Bacon’s column … and something will finally shake out, and it might be you. You’ve got fall guy written all over you, a big dumb Irishman with a shamrock behind your ear.”
Donovan sat heavily behind the desk, massaged his chin with a huge hand. He rested his eyes on Challis’ face for a long moment. “Look, my friend, you’re not being realistic. You’re on the wrong track with me and Aaron and … and Mr. Laggiardi is just an old friend from New York days, we’ve done some deals together, kissed the Blarney stone, ey? Heard the chimes at midnight, don’t y’know?” He smiled with the heavy falseness: he was misinterpreting the moment and his role in it. “I assure you, I wish you no ill,” he said confidently. “On the contrary, you sound like you mean what you say, maybe you didn’t kill Goldie and maybe you were framed, as you say … but, dammit, boy-o, it’s got nothing to do with Jack Donovan, and that’s the point so far as himself is concerned. How could it? Here, have a cigar …” He offered a pigskin case, and Challis held the cigar, rolled it between his fingertips. “Seriously … what could it all have to do with me?”
“I don’t know,” Challis said. The wind was getting in at the window, moving the curtain and belling it out around the air conditioner. “That’s the point—I’m trying to build something on what I have got … and you’re what I’ve got. Goldie’s datebook, your buddy-buddy routine with Roth, and a big-time thug with his hooks in you—”
“Bullshit! You’re trying my patience. I’ve been very tolerant—”
“We’ve been through this. Laggiardi owns you, right? No point in looking like a dead fish—I know about you. Laggiardi owns you. And Aaron Roth has, for some unimaginable reason, bet the farm on your magazine. The very idea stuns the unwary mind.”
“What are you talking about now?”
“Roth’s money is behind the magazine. You haven’t got a pisspot to call your own. Without an angel, you’d have been out of business months ago.”
“Rubbish! Aaron is one of many public-spirited men who have made nominal investments—”
“You kill me.” Challis laughed. “The fact is, the Aaron Roths of this world do not go around putting money into magazines. Or into shysters like you. Don’t forget, however close to Aaron you are now, I was there before you. So what’s so bad about telling me what you and Goldie were onto, what made her so impatient with you? It’s so simple …”
Donovan sat watching him, weighing the situation. Finally he sighed, with a look of pugnacity. “I have nothing to tell you, Challis. And let me offer some advice. Were I you, I’d get the hell away from here. There are ways, you must know that, you’ve been around for a long time—there’s always a way. You can’t change the past, and that’s also something you should know. The jury says you’re guilty. You’ve got your newspaperman and your lawyer and your datebook, but if they catch you again, that stuffs gonna be just so much garbage. I’m not gonna call the cops, you’ve got me in a somewhat sensitive position—I admit it—but I probably wouldn’t call them anyway. I’ve gotten away with this and that all my life, I like to see guys get away with it, whatever it is. But you’re gonna run out of luck before the cops run out of guys looking for you. You’ve got an edge now, you’re halfway to freedom … take the edge. And you’ll be free—South America, maybe? That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Why stay here and get your ass chopped up by Vito and Aaron Roth? What’s happened has happened. Just put paid to it, me bucko, and thank God for a weird second chance.”
“I know, I know,” Challis said, “and may the sun always be at my back, so on and so forth.”
“Trust me,” Donovan said with massive pink-faced sincerity.
“Trust you? If all I knew about you was what you did to Morgan Dyer’s father, I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could drop-kick you.”
“You can’t be serious—you’re that thick with Morgan? Well, well, well. She just can’t let the past die.” He stood up with an air of the conversation being closed and tapped the cigar ash into the wastebasket. “Women have blind spots, more than men.” He came around the corner of the desk. “Morgan is a particularly unforgiving, dishonest, stupid little cunt. Now, get out of my way—do whatever you want. I’ve given you good advice, take it. You’re no responsibility of mine.” He put his hand on Challis’ chest to push him aside. Without thinking, working in a sudden red anger, Challis stepped back, set himself, and slammed his fist into Donovan’s face. Blood spattered immediately, on his hand, across Donovan’s upper lip. The look of surprise faded almost as it appeared, and Donovan threw his weight forward, smashing Challis back against the thin office door. The cigar, glowing, fell to the floor. Donovan’s knee came up, driving at Challis’ crotch; his fist pumped into Challis’ sides and chest, knocking his breath out. Challis saw an empty blackness, fought to breathe, tried to move sideways to avoid the probing knee. Donovan outweighed him by thirty pounds, swarmed over him, panting and punching. The massive pink head was down, ramming at his breastbone, pinning him against the wall. Challis made a last attempt to fling himself away from the wall and door, and Donovan snapped his head up quickly, catching Challis’ jaw. Feeling his knees turning wobbly, he sagged forward and fell against the front edge of the desk. He grabbed the statuette of
the Maltese falcon, turned, and swung it weakly in an arc and caught the side of the pink head, slicing the top of a thick pink ear. Donovan groaned and went to his knees, shaking his head as Challis pulled himself to a standing position. Donovan stared at the floor. “Beat it,” he muttered thickly. “Beat it … or you’ll think Goldie was lucky.” He looked up at Challis. His mouth was smeared with blood from his nose, and a river of blood dripped from his ear.
The door swept open. Morgan stood watching them.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. She stepped into the room, closed the door on the noise filtering down the hallway. “And I thought reason might prevail. Ah, well …”
“They catch this asshole,” Donovan muttered, “and you’re gonna be one lady in big fuckin’ trouble.”
“Look at him,” Challis said. “Put the squeeze on him, and his Irish runs down his leg … and he’s just a sleazy New York punk.”
“Now, now,” Morgan said. She was shaking her head in disbelief. “I grant you that Jack is a slimy creep—”
“Get him outta here, Morgan,” Donovan said. He was cupping his injured ear with one hand, the other gripping the edge of the desk as he got up. “Get him out or I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”
“Put a sock in it, lard.” Challis looked at Morgan. “I’m going from here to see Aaron Roth and hear what he’s got to say about our bloody leprechaun here. And you ought to take him off your guest list for good.”
“Stay away from Roth,” Donovan said, his fists clenching. But there was a sudden pleading quality in the tenor voice. “Stay away. For your own good. Morgan, tell him—tell him to get out while he can.
Morgan flared at him, as if she had just remembered who he was: “To save your neck? Don’t be ridiculous, Jack—really. If Toby had just killed you in here, I’d help him bury the body … you know that. What do I care what happens to you? My God, now you’re bleeding on my desk—get out! Now, get out of my office, my store!” She grabbed the large man’s arm and yanked his hand away from the ear, pulling him toward the door, pushing him into the hallway toward the rear. Challis heard him yell in pain. In a moment she was back.
Hollywood Gothic Page 15
