Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  The rifle shots woke him.

  It was dark, still raining, and somebody was shooting at something. It sounded like the crack of a .22, snapping at him from his childhood.

  He got out of bed; it was nearly five o’clock, but dark as the dead of night outside. Morgan was stretched the length of the bed, lying naked on her belly. He stood beside her, rested his hand on the swell of her hip, listened: nothing. No more shots. He put on his pants, walked out into the living room, hearing the rain. He went across to the sliding glass door, stopped again. He felt something: maybe it was the wind hitting the huge pane of glass; he fancied he saw the ripple.

  He opened the door, stepped barefoot onto the wet patio.

  The next shot sounded closer, and he flinched.

  He moved to the far end of the patio near the low shrubs and the squat pines, stepped out onto the wet grass, felt the rain soaking him.

  At the edge of the property he stared out into the canyon void. A man was shouting not far away … lights suddenly flared in a house cantilevered on stilts out over the canyon … another shot exploded and he heard the man in the house yelling, a voice but no words came through the curtain of wind and rain … then a rumbling, tearing sound, the ripping out of deep roots … another shot … he watched the house on stilts begin to sag. One stilt swayed, broke loose from its concrete mooring, swung loose from the bottom of the house, slipped away … the corner of the house slowly twisted downward, the canyon wall beneath the house began to move in the shadows cast from the lights burning above … the side of the canyon was sliding, moving faster, with a rush of trees, shrubs, rocks … he heard it and saw it … a second stilt bent loose and the house tilted dramatically backward … suddenly it came loose, the lights went out, and in the glow from the other houses clinging to the canyon rim the house was launched downward, moving in an almost stately fashion like an ocean liner sliding down the runners … it came apart slowly, kindling, bricks, metal supports, red tiles, furniture bursting through glass walls … Challis heard another shot … this time it came from closer, off to the right on his side of the canyon … afraid, he ran back into the house.

  Morgan was already up, standing naked in the living room, holding a pair of jeans, listening. She held up her hand, motioning him not to speak. Her breasts were high and small, the nipples pointing downward and to the sides of her rib cage as she leaned forward, slipped the jeans on. Finally, in the stillness, she went to the sliding door, stopped at the sound of sudden shouts that flared up, then faded away. Two more shots cracked, seemed to come from next door.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said softly, and went outside.

  The night had come alive.

  One after another the houses strung along the rim were lit up, and shouts mingled with the rain, wind, and gunfire. Sirens screamed on Sunset Boulevard, red lights were flashing on the twisting canyon road below them.

  “Who’s doing the shooting?” He’d joined her outside, slipping and falling on the wet grass. He heard the rumbling noise, felt a tremor deep in the earth. Morgan was running toward the shed at the back of the lawn beyond the pool. The shots came again, and the house next to them on the right—it had no lawn, rested in air on stilts—began to go. The same awful tearing sounds he’d heard before came again … the house went quickly and Morgan turned halfway along the length of the pool, stopped. Ahead of her, the large pine beside the shed began to lean toward emptiness.

  “Come back,” he called, moving toward her. “Everything’s going.”

  She saw the tree going and ran back toward Challis.

  The tree went over like a twig, and the lawn began to disappear. The shed slid away in a matter of seconds, was gone. The gunman had reached them, and Challis stifled a scream as two shots seemed to crack at the edge of the pool.

  “Somebody’s shooting at us,” he yelled again, grabbing her, pulling her toward the patio.

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s the gas lines breaking as the hills slide away … they explode.”

  “Good God …”

  As they reached the patio, she stopped him. At the far end of what was left of the lawn, the swimming pool grew an enormous jagged crack and broke off, the water rushing like a miniature cataract, a tidal wave pouring down with the sliding mud … and then, as quickly as it had started, it moved on, wiping away what lay next door.

  She turned and clung to him, shaking, her naked breasts wet and cold and hard, flattened against his chest.

  Seven o’clock, a wet gray morning. The canyon, in the aftermath of its collapse, looked like a battlefield, fog and steam rising from the mounds of mud, broken water and sewage pipes, all the bricks and kindling and I-beams, concrete boulders and slabs that had been swimming pools only hours before, the odd pink plastic flamingo, bits and pieces of palm trees … somewhere down there, Morgan’s shed reduced to rubble, buried.

  There was no electricity in the house. Morgan sat at the kitchen table drinking yesterday’s cold coffee. A sense of immediate, desolate loneliness in the house. A wet breeze lapped at the windows. Challis stared into her eyes for a while, went to the bedroom to get dressed. The sheets bore the evidence of their lovemaking. The room still smelled of sex. He cleaned up and went back to the kitchen. Morgan looked up and forced a tiny smile.

  “I feel like I’ve been sliding down the canyon for a week,” she said. “Crash … finally at rest, time to dig my way out.” She shrugged. “Don’t say anything about last night. It was good, no more to say for now. What are you going to do, Toby?”

  “I’ve got some people to see, last-hurrah bullshit. I insist on saying something about last night, by the way.” He sipped the cold coffee and made a face. “I was safer in jail than I’ve been since I escaped. Last night the whole world gave way—”

  “That’s what you have to say about last night?”

  “No. Being with you … being together like that, did it mean anything to you?”

  “What a question!”

  “Well …”

  “Yes, it meant a great deal to me, Toby.”

  “Well, it meant more to me than I can tell you—or than you can imagine. You’re part of my life now, Morgan, you always will be. But …”

  “You have got to get away. There aren’t going to be any answers, there never are any big answers—only questions. You just have to keep going … in your case, going far away. Goldie’s dead and we’re not going to find out who killed her. It just doesn’t matter anymore … don’t keep struggling, things only keep getting worse and worse, Toby.”

  “I know,” he said, nodding slowly. “But it’s hard to accept not finding out … all these lives have come apart because I had to find out. I could have just gotten away, taken any of those offers … my God. But I’ve felt so close to the answer, as if I had the key to it and didn’t know how to use it.”

  “There’s no time left, you know. Listen, Toby, I told you that I love you. I’m not even sure that it’s true, I’m not sure of much of anything anymore, but I’m a victim of what you’ve gone through, we’ve shared the ordeal … and I’m closer to you than I’ve ever been to anyone, and love is part of it, maybe. I can’t let you go back to prison—I’ve got to have the hope that there’s something ahead of us, for us.”

  “I’m going now,” he said. “I’ve got to go. You’ll hear from me, one way or another.”

  At the door she couldn’t look at him.

  “Morgan, remember this. I love you.”

  “Good-bye, Tobias.”

  He kissed her forehead.

  When he got into the Mustang, he didn’t look back. Once again he was the invisible man.

  The Pacific Coast Highway ran wet and clean once he had gotten past the mountains of mud. The sun hitting the paving made it look like gleaming metal. He squinted against the glare. Sunlight brought out the emerald green in the vegetation, the long grasses on his left, the thick grass moving up the hillsides. He heard the birds sing. For the moment, and for the first time in a long time,
life seemed simple. The difference between winning and giving up had turned out to be minimal, at best.

  He passed the road leading down to the beach where Tully had wiped out Laggiardi’s army: it was quiet, undisturbed, and he wasn’t even mildly curious. Let it be, let it be … as far as he knew, there were stiffs all over the beach with gulls breakfasting on eyeballs. It didn’t make any difference, not anymore. It was all over now. Aaron, Donovan, Goldie, Morty … He was still alive and he wasn’t quite sure what mattered anymore, only what didn’t.

  The trailer court was bright and clean and shabby. The same old guy nodded hello, asked what the hell was going on last night. Nothing, Challis told him, just a family reunion, everybody looking for Aunt Priscilla. And now you’re back, the old guy said. Right, now I’m back.

  She was out weeding her flowerbeds, wearing a floppy old hat, a ragged sweater with leather buttons, a billowing plaid skirt. She didn’t look dramatic or ominous. She looked up from beneath the floppy hat, winked, shook her head.

  “Oh, it’s you, young man. I knew you’d turn up—d’you believe me? Well, no matter. I knew.”

  “Sure,” Challis said. “You know the past, present, future.”

  “Mmmm.” She got up from her knees, dropped a trowel into the pocket of her skirt. “Cuppa tea?”

  He followed her into the neat little trailer home and sat in a threadbare overstuffed easy chair. She brought him tea and settled down at her tiny kitchen table, watching him, smiling.

  “Well, Priscilla”—he sighed—“do your stuff. …”

  My dearest Morgan,

  See, it’s just like the movies. A letter in the mailbox, nervous fingers fumbling in a close-up, paper tearing, then the magical movie words we know and love: “by the time you read this, I’ll be gone.” I’m unsure of myself, not at all sure if I know how to tell you this, because I’m not at all sure I understand it myself—no, I’m bullshitting you there. I understand it all just fine, and I’m having trouble with this because I don’t know what your reaction will be. Sorry. I’m a fainthearted, cowardly son of a bitch.

  All I ever really wanted was the identity of Goldie’s killer. Remember? That almost got lost in the scuffle. It seems a million years ago, but there you are. So you saw it through with me, coming at the question of Goldie from any angle at all—the family, business associates, gangsters. The oddities kept coming up. Well, I’m responsible for digging up a lot of trouble and I don’t know that anything is better now, but what’s worse is pretty fucking obvious. But then, I’m no moralist, not anymore.

  But even through the horror of yesterday and last night, I never seemed to get any closer to Goldie’s killer. I was the only one who really cared, who really wanted the answer, who thought it was important at all.

  I couldn’t leave it alone, of course. I was the one who’d been convicted of murdering her and gotten his ass thrown in jail. I was the one who’d known her best, had been through so much of life with her—I don’t know what she meant to me, if much of anything anymore, but our lives were intertwined for better or worse. … Worse, as it turned out. I had to have the answer. I owed that to Goldie. Which was why I chose to follow up on what she seemed to have on Aaron. It was all of a piece, what Goldie was doing, what I was determined to finish for her. … Obligation. That’s what I felt I had, what I owed her.

  But when I analyzed the situation I always came back to the prime question: what could I do about it? I had been there the night she was murdered. They had found me standing over her body, for God’s sake. Blood everywhere, her skull smashed in, blood on the heavy base I’d had the Oscar mounted on. I was the obvious candidate for the big fall, and they saw to it that I took it.

  My own memory of the night was cloudy. Aaron had said a beach boy had killed her, one pickup too many, and that hit a nerve in me—there was something like that stuck in the back of my memory, a clue; then I began to see it in my sleep, the murder night, I began to see it in my sleep … sandy footprints, that’s what began it … it sounds stupid, but I saw them in my sleep, there they were, sandy footprints in the hallway of the beach house. And I thought that I could see the man who made them … a Chicano beach boy, strong, perfectly muscled, just the kind of trinket Goldie was so devoted to collecting.

  Maybe Aaron was right. A beach boy, a drifter, a male prostitute—they particularly turned her on. She used to say, “I’m going to buy myself a stiff young cock tonight, Toby,” stuff like that, and she’d laugh deep in her throat. Aaron’s theory made awfully good sense, it fit with those weird incomplete, patchy memories that kept visiting me by night—why shouldn’t she have picked out the wrong boy and been killed by him?

  But the memories kept jumping at me from the dark. I kept remembering sounds I’d heard on the porch that night, sounds of someone moving around out there, bumping into things, but it was all so confused. It was the time element that did me in—I couldn’t remember how long I stood there looking at Goldie’s dead body and hearing the sounds on the porch and seeing the sandy, wet footprints on the floor. …

  Well, now we know the sounds were made by Sol. He saw the whole thing, he saw the murder committed, and he realized that his intention to kill Goldie had been carried out by a sort of deus ex machina … but why, I wondered, would the old bastard let me go to prison when he knew the truth? And why wouldn’t he just tell me who killed her?

  Yesterday—last night—I was very moved by that thunder-and-lightning meeting with Priscilla Morpeth. Maybe her unreality made me feel a bond with her … or maybe it was because she had such a strong reaction to me when she saw me at the observatory—she didn’t know who the hell I was, but she seemed to know something about me, to see something about me. So, this morning, after your hillside had collapsed and buried those goddamn stupid diaries forever, I went to her, back to the trailer park.

  The crazy thing was, she was expecting me! I told her who I was, and we spent the morning sitting in her trailer, drinking tea, talking. She fed me homemade doughnuts, mothered me in a weird way. And together we remembered what happened that night at the beach house. … I listened to her voice, Morgan, and it began to come clear to me.

  Who killed Goldie?

  Priscilla knew everything. Past, present, future. She cleared away the fog in my mind. I began to remember what happened that night. …

  For a start, at least, Aaron had been right in his assumption. There had been a beach boy. He had been there when I arrived, though I didn’t know it. Poor silly bastard, I arrived on time for my dinner with Goldie, full of hope and wondering if I should have brought flowers and a box of chocolates. She’d sounded good on the phone, warm and friendly and hyper, and I went to Malibu in a fine mood. She still had that effect on me: I always responded to her when she chose to treat me with anything approaching decency and civility, no matter how many times I’d been taught a lesson. I had the idea that I might not be leaving until morning. No excuses.

  I knocked at the door, smelled the sea and a wood fire. No answer. So I went inside. There was music coming from somewhere, a bossa nova, the kind of music she’d always put on when we were spending an evening devoted to sex. I made the connection … Christ. I called her name. The wind was blowing the curtains. It was dim, lit mainly from the fireplace, but I could see wet sandy footprints in the hallway. Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz on the record player. I called her name again. The hallway was dark. I heard a noise at the end of the hallway, and I stood waiting, listening. Then she came out of the darkness toward me, her shape curved and smelling like a good time … she had a long sweater on, baggy, down around her hip, and her legs were bare. She was humming the song, she didn’t say anything, just kept coming toward me, and I knew I’d been right about the night, about her mood. She came into my arms.

  I kissed her and there was something wrong. She began to laugh and shake, she leaned back away from me, laughing. I tasted a man in her mouth, there was no doubt about that, and I ran to the sink in the kitchen,
gagging and spitting it out of my mouth, listening to her laugh. She turned the light on, and when I looked at her, I saw she had that crazy glazed look she’d have when the dope and the sex and the rest of it all got to her. Her legs were still sweaty and her hair was plastered down with sweat, and she couldn’t stop laughing at me. Then I sensed something else, another sound, and the beach boy came down the hallway … he was kind of slow and tentative, he was naked, obviously groggy and confused at being interrupted in the middle of his performance.

  The next thing I knew—and now I remember it with total clarity—the boy was running, stark naked, back down the hallway. I heard the door slam and I made a charge at Goldie, knocked her backward against my desk. She couldn’t stop laughing, it was the laughing that did it, pushed me all the way. …

  I took the Oscar and stopped the laughter for good. That was what Solomon Roth saw from the deck. That was what I couldn’t bring myself to remember.

  He folded the letter, put it into an envelope, and sat staring out at the Pacific breaking across the sand, slapping the pilings. The sun was working hard and the gulls slid like shadows over the surf. Behind him Sunset Boulevard began its winding ascent inland from the Pacific Coast Highway. He had been sitting on the windblown deck with the Boston ferns and the sunshine. The tall blond girl came to replenish the wine. She looked up at the sun and took a deep breath. She was extraordinarily beautiful, a California girl, the current model.