Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

Sol stroked the ball, and they heard the clicks as it made its rounds. Aaron sighed, head down. His shoulders quivered. The camera panning the perimeters of the property was on a time lock and had stopped at the dinosaurs, who stood, like the four people in the control room, for the next act to begin. Daffy sipped, turned the page. She was reading the Modern Library edition of The Red and the Black.

  “Shame on you, Aaron,” Sol said, carefully lining up his next shot. “You have lied to me, Aaron”—click-click-click—“and I am deeply unhappy that you would do that. But, but, but … I understand why you did it. And as for me, I was blind, or insensitive, or self-deceiving, or all three, and I avoided the truth with all my power …” Click-click. Aaron’s dabbing had stopped, and one eye was watching his father from behind the crumpled, bloody handkerchief. “Yes, I refused to see what was going on around me, I couldn’t believe I could be touched by all the rot and corruption I saw out there.” Click-click.

  “Father, what in the name of God are you talking about?” The round spectacles sat crookedly on the hooked nose. Aaron’s face seemed to be working its way around the pain and the words in an attempt to hold itself together. It was a near thing. If the last bits of composure went, Challis had the feeling that Aaron would go too. “Look at me, look what’s happened to me … what are you going on about? We’ve got to do something about me.”

  “Now, now, calm yourself, that’s just what we’re going to do. But I’ve got to get clear about this lying business … you lied to me about your poor wife’s diaries, Kay’s diaries. You told me that they told the whole sordid truth about Kay … and now what do I discover? That they tell the truth about you, what you did to her, what you drove the poor woman to—”

  “Oh, for the love of God, make sense! What difference do the diaries make to anybody now?” Aaron was losing the struggle: he was squeezing the edge of the ornately carved billiard table like a man hanging from a twentieth-floor window ledge.

  “To begin with, my son, a million dollars’ worth of difference … to save your neck, not to save us from the publication of Kay’s calamitous indiscretions.” He was surveying the table, looking from side to side in search of the right shot, refusing to look at Aaron, whose voice was growing increasingly strident.

  “You’re a crazy old man,” Aaron shouted, his voice catching helplessly in his collapsed nasal passages.

  “Careful,” Solomon Roth said. Sol stroked the ball again and watched the result, which was out of camera range.

  He stood the cue on the floor before himself, and leaned on it with a fraction of his weight. The crocodile smile lay in wait for Aaron. Towser looked up from the far end of the room, stared at the scene. “You see, you convinced me that not only was Kay reaching from beyond the grave to dirty our lives, but that your daughter was just like her … two of a kind, filthy, depraved sluts, an insult to everything my life has stood for, everything I wanted Maximus to be. Kay was dead, and we could buy Donovan off for a million … but I knew we couldn’t trust Goldie—she’d never keep her part of the bargain, not for a million, not for anything … she hated you that much …. but what you had me believing was a lie, Goldie didn’t hate you blindly, it wasn’t in her blood … she knew what you had done to her mother, she had read the diaries, and unlike old Solomon Roth, she wasn’t operating on the basis of hearsay, of your lies. … What I’m trying to make clear to you, Aaron, is this—if I’d known the truth you kept from me, I would have looked at Goldie differently … I would have gone to Malibu that night to talk with her … not to kill her!”

  For an instant Challis thought he was going to faint; he held on to the metal flatbed, closed his eyes: he was standing in the beach house, Goldie was dead at his feet, there was sand on the floor … something moved somewhere, a shape … he heard footsteps outside, saw a shadow—Solomon Roth. Morgan stood beside him, he felt her, smelled her, and he pressed the side of his face against her. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from the monitor.

  Aaron’s mouth was open, gulping like a fish. He staggered back as if he’d received a physical blow. He couldn’t stop the blood running from his nose. The handkerchief was dark with it.

  “You,” Aaron croaked. “You … and all the time I thought it was Toby! Yes, I really did, and I didn’t blame him for killing her.” He was almost talking to himself. “One too many beach boys, and Toby got a bellyful and hit her with the Oscar.” He looked at Sol, squinting. “You …”

  Sol turned his broad back on him, and measured another shot, drew the cue back slowly, and slid it through. Click-click. Challis heard Tully’s breathing. Herbert bit a fingernail. Nobody moved.

  “Please, Father, stop that.” Aaron moved forward jerkily, as if his physiology was coming undone. His voice slipped on the scale, wavered upward, like a drunken whore in high heels. “Don’t you understand what’s happening tonight? Listen to me, god damn you … listen to me!”

  Sol sighted along the trajectory of another shot.

  Aaron suddenly flew at his father, fingers curled in a pathetic, birdlike attack, a high-pitched howl sounding tinny. The fingers were raking the black dinner jacket weakly and uselessly, when Sol turned slowly, raised the cue deliberately, impassively, and smashed it across Aaron’s arm and chest. The shock cut his cry in midair, killed it, and the round spectacles smashed on the edge of the table. Aaron clutched his arm, weaved backward.

  “Don’t ever touch me again, or come near me, or speak my name.” The words hit him like slugs, each one driving him away from the camera. Towser pricked his ears. Aaron groped behind him, reached the couch in the center of the room. “You made me go to Malibu that night … you have no respect for life, for decency, for anything that matters.” He took a few heavy strides toward his son. Glass from Aaron’s spectacles crackled underfoot. Aaron stumbled, slipped, fell backward onto the couch. The television console gave off a slight whirring sound, a dry claustrophobic warmth mingling with the heat of their bodies. Challis’ face felt greasy with perspiration. His stomach turned as he watched Solomon Roth’s broad back as he advanced toward what was left of his son.

  “Listen to me,” Aaron cried, his hands up to ward off any more blows. “You’re not the only one who has killed, Father … listen to me, I’ve killed too, I’m a murderer—”

  “You contemptible coward!” Solomon Roth seemed to be gathering strength as the ordeal went on. “What are you talking about? You drive people to their death, but you can’t commit the act yourself.” He had built up to the final charge, the accusation of impotence and cowardice, and he stood looking down at Aaron.

  “But I did, I did … I killed …”

  Oh, God, here it comes, old Morty dragged out again. But Challis’ mind was swirling, Goldie falling gently downward, hair like taffy, falling in layers, again, again, blood in her hair. It had been Solomon Roth. Oh, God … what was Aaron saying? What was that …?

  “I killed Jack Donovan.” Aaron was sobbing, talking from between clenched teeth. “I had to kill him, I had to get the diaries … everything depended on … the diaries. Ah, Father, my God, he didn’t have them, he didn’t have them. I killed him, though, I can still hear it, my God, the noise …”

  Morgan gasped, and Tully Hacker squeezed his temples, their eyes never leaving the small black-and-white images.

  “You killed Jack Donovan?” Solomon’s voice rumbled in the stillness. “You pulled the trigger?” Aaron whimpered, struggled to right himself in the couch, a terrified child of almost sixty. “You must be insane.”

  “Are you insane?” Aaron said.

  “But why? Why Donovan? You knew he knew what was in the diaries … what was really in the diaries, and not just what you told me.”

  “Oh, no, he knew more … he told me a million wasn’t enough, he told me he knew about the checks, what they really meant … he said he was going to take it all to Vito—”

  “You make no sense,” Solomon Roth said.

  Aaron struggled to sound calm, but he only sounded demented.


  “Oh, but I do make sense. Goldie had told Jack all about the checks, about Priscilla’s letter, the whole story.” He looked at his watch, shook his head spastically. “I don’t know what to do, I’ve got to find Priscilla.” He wiped at the leftover tears, straightened up. But his voice was all wrong; he sounded as if he were a child talking to a child. It was grotesque. “You see, Father, Priscilla’s got the letter that proves it … proves I killed Morty Morpeth … the letter, and all the checks paying off Priscilla, that adds up to enough to convict me—but I had to kill Morty, because he might have gone to you and told you about the money … you can see that. I had to have the money, I’d gotten in so deep with Vito back in New York, gambling, I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Go on, Aaron,” Solomon said slowly. “You’re telling me that you’re the one who stole the money from Maximus thirty years ago—it wasn’t the little accountant, after all …”

  “And I had to kill him—I mean, what else could I do? He was the only one who knew what we’d done, and I couldn’t run the risk of your ever finding out … why, my God, you’d have run me out of town … or worse! So, I killed him. …”

  “But now I have found out, Aaron. I’ve found out that you stole from me, lied to me, drove your first wife to her death … after using her to satisfy Laggiardi’s sexual needs.”

  “What? How did you—”

  “I’ve found out that you planted the seeds of my hatred for Goldie,” Solomon Roth said, taking a cigar from a box and clipping the end with a gold cutter. He sniffed the cigar, rolled it on his tongue. “You made me believe that she had to die for being the kind of person she was.” He was measuring his thoughts, building some sort of case in his own mind. He lit the cigar with a wooden match, taking his time. He waved the match out, left a string of smoke hanging in the air. “You made it necessary for me to accept vermin like Laggiardi into my studio … my studio … and you have pointlessly murdered the Irishman—pointlessly, since he didn’t have the diaries and since I’ve found out the truth anyway.” He put his hands in his jacket pockets, stepped back, and looked down at his son, who twitched nervously, dabbing at the blood, straightening his dirty tie. “And you have made the fatal mistake of misreading me, of reaching the irrational conclusion that I am somehow like you because I have faced the need to murder. Well, Aaron, I am not like you, I am not lost and desperate and weak. No, and I do not accept the responsibility for the ridiculous, grotesque creature you have somehow become.”

  “Father!” The cry of anguish seemed prehuman, elemental.

  “Do you have the gun you killed Donovan with? The one you’d have used on Priscilla Morpeth? … Answer me!”

  “Yes, yes …” He rumbled in his coat pocket.

  “My God, you’re such a hopeless imbecile. If you’d killed her, the letter you’re so afraid of would undoubtedly have gone to the police. … Do you have the gun?”

  “Yes, yes, here it is.” He held up the black weapon, difficult to make out on the small screen.

  “All right, Aaron. You alone have the power to end all this.” He turned his back on Aaron, walked toward the locked door and passed just out of the camera’s range. “Do it … and rest assured, I’ll see your mess is cleaned up. … Come, Towser.” The room was quiet. Towser got up wearily and ambled on toward Solomon Roth, out of the picture. The door locks rattled briefly, the door clicked shut.

  Tully Hacker reached out, hit another button. The hallway outside the billiard room popped onto one screen. Solomon Roth stood in the shadowy darkness, stared at the door for a moment, then began walking slowly toward the camera with Towser in step beside him.

  Aaron Roth sat quietly on the couch. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and gingerly tried to blow his nose, gave it up, threw the splotchy cloth on the floor. With his free hand he scratched his head. He sat up, gave a deep sigh, straightened his shoulders. His other hand came up quickly with the gun in it. Morgan screamed: “Oh, no!” Aaron pushed the gun barrel into his mouth, blew most of his head off, fell backward on the couch. Blood spattered backward, and the slug, having removed the back of Aaron’s head, still had enough power to smash the aquarium behind the couch. The glass exploded, water rushed out over Aaron and the couch. Morgan was crying.

  Tully and Herbert Graydon pushed past her and ran across the foyer and down the dimly lit hall toward the billiard room. Solomon Roth turned and watched them reach the door, go inside. Solomon strode calmly toward Challis and Morgan.

  “You saw the performance?” Sol asked. The smell of cigar smoke filled the narrow corridor.

  Challis nodded. Morgan sagged against him.

  “The world is a better place without him,” the old man said calmly. “Failing health, pressure of work, suicide … Don’t waste your sorrow on my son. Toby, time really is running out for you—my offer stands, we can get you away and I can keep this under control here. With Tully’s help. He’ll see me through it, he always gets us through things. But I’m afraid you’re still in the soup. Aside from the fact that no one could ever prove that I killed Goldie, I was being absolutely accurate in there with Aaron. I went to the beach house that night with the intention of killing Goldie … the gatekeeper let me in, but I got him the job, he used to be at Maximus, and there’s nothing that could make him place me there—but the point is, I didn’t kill her, she was already dead when I got there. I was a wee bit late.”

  Challis said, “Solomon, are you human? At all?”

  “Don’t be tiresome and philosophical, Tobias. Ask my doctor … I’m not altogether sure, some days I feel quite human, other days I’m much better. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go inform Daffy of Aaron’s suicide—oh, you look so shocked, Tobias. You think I have no feelings, is that it? Well, in Aaron’s case you’re wrong … I do have feelings. Now I feel an overwhelming sense of relief. He was a terrible man. Please excuse me.” He bowed slightly, nodded, and went up the stairway from the foyer to the second floor. His step was almost jaunty.

  Tully was coming back down the hall, Herbert Graydon in his wake. Tully’s face was hard, impassive, but he gave a grim little grin. “Jesus,” he said. “What a mess. Goddamn gasping little fish all over the floor. You two had better get out of here. Herbert and I were having a brandy in his room when we heard the shot, we ran down the hall, found him already dead … I’ve got to report it right now.”

  “All right,” Challis said. “You know what you’re doing.”

  “I surely do. Now, hit the road. Are you going—”

  “He’s coming back with me,” Morgan said.

  “You know you’re just about out of time, Toby.”

  “I know. I don’t know what to do—I thought Aaron killed Goldie, then Sol … now Sol tells me he meant to kill her, but she was already dead.” Challis rubbed his tired eyes. Tully Hacker was blurred before him. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You know what Sol has said all along.”

  “But who killed Goldie?”

  “You’re the only man left on earth who cares.”

  Tully walked them across the foyer, out to the Mustang.

  “I don’t understand Sol,” Challis said. “What I saw in there, it’s not human, Tully.” Morgan was in the car, head back, eyes closed.

  “It’s the good doctor, that’s all. He’s got Sol running on high octane. Go get some sleep. Tomorrow’s your day, one way or the other.”

  In the rearview mirror Challis saw the lights going on in the house. Then the grasping shrubbery closed around the car. By the time they got down to the Bel Air gate, the police car was coming in.

  30

  TOGETHER, THINKING ALMOST AS A single organism, operating on that simple, driven level, they sought sex as a way of proving to themselves that they were still alive, awake, hopeful. Too tired to speak: sex without words, a mutual need to engulf one another. The exhaustion, the tension, the shock, all they had been through together with time imploding, collapsing on them, everything worked changes in the
ir personalities which had been held back, against their natures. They were glad to be alive, whatever the future held.

  In Challis’ mind, mingling with the touch and smell and sounds of her damp, freshly bathed body and soft, throaty moans, were the afterimages of the night … the jerking, dying men on the rainy beach, Tully Hacker coming toward him out of darkness, the soundproofing of wind and surf and fear which made it all unreal, like a movie … Priscilla Morpeth in her cape, with her jewelry and pointy nose and clicking-bright eyes, clinging to the parapet like a miniature Orson Welles at Elsinore … the disintegration of Aaron Roth and the impassivity of Solomon Roth, the old man’s science-fiction recovery from the senility of the afternoon, his emergence in the evening as something the likes of which Challis could only associate with the old movies offering a villain who fluttered through the window as a bat.

  Morgan’s passion was almost out of control, desperate and uninhibited and vulnerable, weeping, then urging him on with animal cries. She twisted her long solid body, turned and groped the air with hooked fingers; she ground her teeth, eyes closed, driving against him, working out all the frustration and built-up heat with the strength of her firm, long muscles and the weight of her body. Rain drummed on the roof, their mouths slid wetly across their bodies, fingertips stroked, penetrated, stroked, and he emptied himself into her once, then again … and finally, smeared with sweat and tears and semen and saliva and her wetness, they lay quiet and uncovered, the bedclothes tangled and kicked aside, and their naked flesh grew cold in the dark. She curled against him, half-asleep. “I love you,” she murmured, pushing her hips against his thighs, making him stiffen again, spreading herself again with the long fingers, drawing him inside yet again. …

  Was it a dream? Or was he awake, mind drifting in sexually induced hallucination? Was it still the sweat from her breast and belly clinging to him, or had he begun sweating again? He heard her breathing as he lay on his back staring at the ceiling of her bedroom, smelling the rich, dark aroma of her sex, tasting her on his tongue. One of her long legs, a pale, languid river, was flung across a rope of sheet, carelessly, elegantly, like a kinky ad in Vogue, and a small white breast was visible beneath her arm. He watched her, the tiny pink nipple erect, rising in a series of delicate terraces like a pyramid; he leaned across, moved his tongue across the pyramid, tasted the saltiness, smiled to himself at the thought of the things you could live for. But the woman in the cape, the lumpy figure on the parapet, watched him from the forefront of his memory, withdrew the passion from him like blood into a syringe … past, present, and future, she knew it all, or so she said, past and present and future … and he’d been surrounded by death, she’d seen that clearly enough, and she’d had no idea who he was … she’d seen all the death, with him moving through it. He lay back on the bed, his brain too busy to sleep but much too worn down to stay alert.