Hollywood Gothic (27 page)

“Kay was doomed from the beginning, or so it seems to me at four o’clock in the morning of what has become a very bizarre lifetime.”

“Still, when she married Aaron, there must have been a feeling of hope, a new life. She was only twenty years old … then the baby, Aaron coming out of the war all right …”

“She’d have been better off if Aaron had gotten killed,” Challis said with a sudden rush of feeling. “Kay would have been better off, Goldie wouldn’t have had a father to spend her life hating … all of our lives would have gone a different way. I’d never have met Goldie if her father hadn’t been Aaron Roth of Maximus. Yeah, why didn’t some Jap kill the son of a bitch? Would have made the war worthwhile—so, what have we got on Aaron at this point?”

Morgan pulled a legal pad toward her and started jotting down the indictment.

“The customary movie-mogul infidelities,” she said. “No big deal, but he flaunted them, hurt her … women who worked for him on the one hand, women Kay knew on the other.”

“Check.”

“Then the business end of things—she saw what he did and she couldn’t believe it.”

“How much did he take?”

“She says he embezzled half a million dollars from Maximus … from his
father
.”

“And apparently kept it quiet,” Challis said. “Can you imagine, stealing that kind of money from Solomon Roth and having to keep him from finding out.”

Morgan picked up one of the diaries and opened it to a shred of legal-pad paper used as a bookmark. She read:

A. and I had another terrible slugfest last night at Draycott’s. Arthur D. actually held him back or I think he’d have done an honestogod Joe Louis on me. Penny took me out by the pool house and asked me if A. had started drinking—would that he had! I had a good cry and then P. & I went for a midnight horseback ride—when we got back I was calmed down and A. had taken the Rolls and left, apparently sputtering to Arthur that if he, Art, wanted me for a loan-out he could have me, but only on a permanent live-in basis. Etc. Lots of obscene suggestions about what I’m best at. Charming. I stayed the night and tried to think it out, listening to the horses snorting in the stable. Read some Robert Benchley but couldn’t keep my mind on it. Why did Aaron tell me about taking the money? I’ll never understand that—if he’d wanted aid and comfort, I’d have supplied it gladly. But no, not him! He told me, then acts as if it’s my fault. Sometimes I think he could kill me just because he told me about the money.
Life
called us and wants to come to our next party! Quel joke!

Morgan pushed her reading glasses down her nose and blinked, looked at Challis. “She was twenty-six when she wrote that. Now, we move ahead just a few months …” She flipped to the next bookmark, adjusted her glasses, and began reading again:

A. got hysterical again last night—typical for the day he gets home from New York. When he’s hysterical and sobbing, he always tells me the things he later hates me for knowing. I finally know why he took the money from Maximus—gambling. I suppose I should be glad it wasn’t for presents for his girlfriends, but I’m not sure I really care anymore. Anyway, he owed some shady character in New York a lot of money, and I’d swear it had something to do with basketball games. Hard to believe. I know more about basketball than Aaron does, but when I told him that, he said you don’t have to know anything about basketball if the game is fixed! Suppose he’s right about that. He wants me to make another picture
soon.
We need the money, he says. How can that be?

Morgan put the diary down and closed it. “So, the refrain repeats itself like an infinity of mirrors. Money, women, insults, hysteria, threats of violence … she keeps talking about trouble at the studio, how worried Aaron is about the mess, the scandal, but she never says what the hell it is … this still in 1947. She went ahead and did the big musical in 1948, but she tells it like it was, talks about how she started hitting the bottle, how her nerve was gone, how Aaron kept taunting her with his women, how he spent the money she’d made. God, why didn’t she leave him? Did she need him, Toby? In some weird way?” She munched a piece of cheesecake, reached over and poked the coals.

“I very much doubt if we’ll ever know. Long time ago, one side of the story, and who the hell knows what kind of kicks they gave each other? But the point is, somebody was lying. Aaron certainly lied to Sol when he told him about Donovan and Goldie having the diaries. Aaron told Sol that the nasty truth about Kay was going to wind up in
Cosmopolitan
or someplace, what was going to get noised around was the awful truth about poor hysterical, sobbing, gambling, womanizing, embezzling Aaron! Well, shit, that would never do … and it would sure never do for Sol to know what was in the diaries. Aaron is still scared half to death of the old man, you can see it in his eyes and the way his hands shake when the old man arrives. Hell, Donovan probably offered to show the diaries to Sol and sent Aaron back into a 1947-style frenzy. You gotta believe that Donovan let Aaron know what was in them … and you can imagine what those diaries meant to Goldie—I really get the point of her excitement, for the first time. She was really about to nail Aaron head-on, not obliquely by dragging Kay through the mud. It was Aaron himself who was going into the toilet.” He shook his head, grinned philosophically. “You have to give Goldie credit. She’d hated Aaron all these years—now, I assume because of what she’d seen him do to Kay—and she wasn’t about to forgive and forget. She was taking Aaron apart for Kay, at least as much as for herself.”

Morgan said, “Aaron must have wanted the diaries destroyed more than anything—”

“Look, he could’ve burned them himself and it wouldn’t have done any good. Photocopies … but, you’re right, I suppose he would have felt better, logic be damned.”

“But with Donovan and Goldie both dead, the diaries burned, well … that sounds a lot safer to me.”

“Then you think Aaron killed Donovan? And Goldie?”

“He looks like a better bet all the time.”

“Except for one thing. No guts.”

Morgan sipped cold coffee, tiredly brushed a strand of blond hair from the corner of her eye. “He may not have lots of guts, Toby, but think of it this way. What would he be more frightened of—killing people or facing one Solomon Roth who knew about the actual contents of the diaries?”

They sat silently, listening to the rain outside.

Challis said, “What’s that envelope?”

“Oh, that … it was stuck inside the back cover of the last diary. Bent the cover all out of shape.” She fingered the envelope, plucked weakly at a red rubber band.

“Well,” he said, trying to work up some kind of impatience, “what is it?”

“Can’t we call it a night?” She tried to cover a yawn and missed. “No, silly, we can’t call it a night when Toby is still awake.” She handed him the envelope. “I haven’t got the strength.”

He rolled the rubber band back. “Checks.” He shrugged, dumped them onto the coffee table. “Lots of checks.”

Working together, they sorted the checks into piles by dates, beginning in 1954. Through 1968, the checks were all signed by Kay Roth, dated at irregular intervals, fifty-six checks totaling $16,800. From the death of Kay Roth in 1968 until early in 1970, there were no checks at all. Then they began again on a monthly basis, eighty-seven more checks totaling $39,150, all signed by Goldie Challis. There were seven checks signed by Jack Donovan, up through December 1977, again on a monthly basis, adding up to $3,500. They were all made out to the same person. One hundred and fifty checks. $59,450. Almost twenty-four years. One recipient.

“So who the hell is Priscilla Morpeth?” Challis sagged back and massaged his calf, moaning.

Morgan, eyes closed, leaned against the couch, shook her head. “Is she in the diaries?”

“No,” Morgan said.

“All three of them, Kay and Goldie and Donovan—they’re all writing checks to Priscilla Morpeth. A quarter of a century, for God’s sake.”

“And they’re all dead, Toby.”

“Blackmail?”

“Somehow Priscilla Morpeth doesn’t strike me as the name of a blackmailer. Pay up, Sluggo, or Priscilla will stop round and beat the shit out of you. No, it doesn’t play.”

Morgan stretched her long arms over her head, pulling her sweater tight across her small breasts. Challis was almost too tired to notice, almost. “Y’know,” she said, “that name is familiar … Morpeth …”

“It’s a street in Westminster, by the cathedral, a couple of blocks from Victoria Station—”

“I mean a person,” she interrupted, “I can remember somebody … no, I guess I can’t, but I think I should be able to … something Hollywood, somebody in the business. My father, I remember something he was talking about, and Morpeth came up in what he said. But it’s gone, I can’t get it. Dammit!” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve had it, Toby. Bed.”

She made up the couch in her library, kissed him good night, and staggered off to her bedroom.

His exhaustion was complete. He lay on his back with a dim light casting blurred shadows. Morpeth … The walls were covered with photographs Morgan had of movie people, a gallery. They looked down at him. Maria Montez. Turhan Bey. Buddy Ebsen. Donald O’Connor. Charles Coburn. Phyllis Thaxter. Charles Laughton. Bill Demarest. Veronica Lake. Mary Murphy. John Kerr. Bruce Bennett. Richard Denning. Christ, it scared him … he knew them all, didn’t miss a one. Nobody in the world should be able to identify all those people. Two murders … Hitchcock looked down from the wall above his head, eyes bulging from gray pouches of fleshy tissue, a fisheye lens. Goldie and Donovan … How many people knew two murder victims? One in a million, maybe … no, longer odds than that. … Priscilla Morpeth sure hadn’t been lucky for Kay and Goldie and Donovan. Vernon might know. That was a thought—Vernon Purcell. He wished he were holding Morgan … the little breasts, the long body flexing. But his last thoughts were of Vernon Purcell.

S
HE WAS WAITING AT THE
breakfast table on the patio, dressed in gray Jax slacks and a turtleneck in forest green, reading the Los Angeles
Times,
absentmindedly pushing a buttery piece of toast into her mouth. She waved without looking up. “Bring your own coffee,” she called. The fog seemed not to have moved, and the city continued to recede behind it, as if ashamed of an awful secret, looking for somewhere to hide. He brought his coffee and sat down. The cold wet air felt good. He burned his tongue on the first sip. “I don’t think Aaron killed anybody,” he said. “That was middle-of-the-night talk. I mean, what the hell can Sol do to him now for embezzling a little money thirty years ago? Treat him with scorn? So be it. Aaron would need more of a prod than that.”

“Look at
The Hollywood Reporter.
Page one, lower right …” She went after another piece of toast while he read:

LAGGIARDI NEW TV

HEAD AT MAXIMUS

Howard Laggiardi, a New York lawyer-accountant, has been named new chief of Maximus TV, it was announced by longtime CEO Solomon Roth. “We have chosen this outstanding young man from outside our industry,” Roth said, “because it is increasingly obvious that a fresh objectivity is required in an era of change and new challenges which weren’t dreamed of as recently as a decade ago.” Laggiardi is already officed on the Maximus lot. At 31, he is one of the youngest men ever to hold a position of such power within a major video production studio. In a brief statement, Laggiardi noted that he intended “to maintain a low profile, keep my nose out of the creative end, and attend to the numbers and learning something about the business/art mutant that television is.”

Challis looked up and frowned. “He’s a Trojan horse for Vito. Right? Vito’s inside the gates. Next he’ll try to put a skateboard under Aaron, send him off with a knife in his back, and wait for Sol to keel over of natural causes. And if that takes too long, well, you can always fiddle with Mother Nature.”

Morgan finally looked up from the
Times.
She smelled like a garden in the rain. She licked butter from her upper lip. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What did Vito have to do to get this Howard the job? Is it tied in with Aaron and Donovan romancing all over town? What a dance card those three make—Aaron, Jack, and Vito. Ouch. Whattya think?”

“I don’t know. I’ve spent twenty years trying to figure this kind of Hollywood doodah, and I don’t think I’ve ever come close. Maybe Howard went to the Maximus personnel office, filled out an application, took the Minnesota Multi-Phasic, and got the job. No, you don’t think so … well, I suppose not. Am I in the papers somewhere this side of the funnies?”

The fog carried rain. The wind shifted, and he felt the spray.

“You’ve been demoted to the Metro section,” she said, “but you have a wee headline of your own, which is something. You’re still missing, as you have doubtless surmised, and the search of the mountain has been called off. Fellow in charge says there’s maybe a ten-percent chance you got down off the mountain, and they are pursuing the Bandersnatch lead and interviewing ‘the wanted man’s former associates.’ Do you think anybody will tell on you? Your agent? Anybody?”

“I doubt it. They’re all too busy planning my getaway. No, I haven’t met a solitary soul who wants me back in jail … they just want me gone. I’m not complaining, just confused. The rich, the powerful, they pay late—”

“They don’t pay at all. You know that.”

Sirens were going again as more houses slid down more canyon walls.

“Did you remember who Morpeth was?”

“No,” she said.

“Well, I know a man. He’ll tell us.”

Vernon Purcell was the rarest of the rare, a man who had turned his back on Hollywood success and found his own kind of happiness by letting himself go, submerging into a haywire world uniquely his own. Almost everybody who had known him in the old days, when he had held court from his own perfectly central table at Romanoff’s, when he had been the architect of a dozen hugely successful careers and responsible for scores of the most publicized pictures ever made, almost all of those old friends had lost track of him and figured he was dead. As far as the business went, he was dead. But he was only living in Santa Monica.