Hollywood Gothic (13 page)

“The wreckage of a State of California light plane carrying convicted murderer Toby Challis to prison, lost in the mountain storms of four days ago, has been found in an uninhabited area about fifteen miles from Little Fawn Lake and the village of Cresta Vista. The crew of two, a guard, and another prisoner on board have all been found dead in the wreckage, and names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin. However, the search party, headed by Sheriff Jeff Billings, reports that the body of Challis has not—repeat, has not—been found. Sheriff Billings had this to say …” There was a slight wait, followed by a transmission full of static: “Challis’ body is not in the plane or in the immediate area. It’s snowing up here now, but we’ve got twenty-five men and we’re going to be searching all night. He’s probably injured and somewhere in the vicinity. No, there are no weapons missing from the plane, but we have to consider the man dangerous. We figure to have him in custody by tomorrow morning sometime. Or at least we hope to have found his body … it would be mighty tough trying to survive up here in the cold, without food, for this long a time.” The static ended and the announcer said: “Stay tuned for fast-breaking news on this, your Los Angeles Laker radio station.” They went to a commercial, and Challis switched to another frequency.

“ … and Sheriff Billings has warned all the residents of Puma Point and Cresta Vista and the Little Fawn Lake area to lock up for the night, not let anyone in, and notify the Cresta Vista sheriff’s office if they spot anyone who might be Toby Challis. He is tall, bearded, with dark hair, and may be injured and disoriented. Stay at this spot on the dial for any further developments.” Challis tuned in another station, heard a much clearer broadcast of Sheriff Billings’ voice as he was interviewed.

“Well, Bob, one thing we can be thankful for is that we found those kids who were lost up here. Who knows what might have happened if Challis and the children had run into one another?” He turned back to the second half of the Lakers game and dozed off and on until it was over, his brain partially conscious and worrying about what was going to happen. The rain seemed to calm him.

At ten minutes before eight he drove to Pink’s hot-dog stand near the corner of Melrose and LaBrea. He parked behind the shoe store next door. There were six people waiting in line, half-unconscious from the smell of the chili and onions. The rain dripped over them, and behind the open counter the regulars were dishing up the victuals, pouring the frozen blocks of chili into the stainless-steel vats, tweezing the paper-wrapped tamales from the steamer, inserting the thick red weiners into the buns and ladling the dense chili over them.

Pete Schaeffer had just arrived, stood towering over the end of the line like an exclamation point. He was six and a half feet tall with huge feet like the pieces of flat, flapping cardboard that kept balloon men from tipping over. He’d once been a collegiate basketball player, and he had the typical round shoulders; beneath his crumpled, stained rain hat was a high dome of freckled forehead, thinning red wisps of hair that filled out beneath the tops of his ears and shambled off disconsolately over his shirt collar. He wore a terrible cheap plaid shirt, crummy old corduroy pants, and muddy sneakers as he stood in the rain. His small blue eyes had the faded, worried tint of a middle-aged man who wore his years uncomfortably, like a cheap suit that was too small. The sleeves of his shirts, in fact, were always too short, giving him the look of a man who had just been tacked up on a wall by the label in the collar. Like every writer in Greater Los Angeles, he was working on a TV pilot; what made him different was that he’d sold two, one of which had run four years and made him quite a lot of money. On Pete Schaeffer, however, the money didn’t show. “Hey, man,” he said in his high nasal tone, “I’d have known you anywhere.”

“Don’t say that,” Challis said. “How’s Joyce?” In the line waiting, small talk gurgled like the rain in the gutters.

“Well, she’s into M and G now,” Schaeffer said. His ears stood out like jug handles beneath the brim of the spotted rain hat. “Still living in, if that’s what you mean.”

“What’s M and G?”

“Moans and groans, asshole. She does voice-overs for porn movies … you know, ooh, aah, ugh, grunt, squeal, all that stuff. Take that away from those pieces of crap, and what have you got?”

“Movies of people fucking and sucking.”

“Well, sure, but the voice-over is important. This morning she had a real crisis, the guy she was working with had an accident on the Harbor Freeway and didn’t show … so Joyce had to do both the man and the woman. I mean, that’s a strain, baby cakes.” He had reached the long counter. “Two chili dogs and an orange drink for me, a chili dog and a chili tamale with orange for my procurer here.” He paid, and they carried the food indoors and found a corner table. Incredibly, Challis was hungry again.

Schaeffer took an anxious, enormous bite, and chili began the long, slow descent down the bulge of his small, round chin. “Now, what’s the scoop?” he mumbled with his mouth full. “I know about the plane crash, the kids, the broad on the mountain, all that shit, but what now? You’re not gonna make some goddamn grandstand fuckin’ play—don’t tell me that, Tobe, we’re too old for that crap.”

“I’m too old to go to prison is what I’m too old for,” Challis said. “I’ve gotta find out who killed Goldie …”

Schaeffer groaned. “Man, you’re one slow study. No, I mean it, Tobe, one helluva slow study … you just don’t
get
it, do you? Whoever snuffed Goldie is a back issue, forgotten.” He stared at Challis like a scientist with a cellular slide that just wasn’t matching up, took another huge bite. “Remember the case of Public Enemy Number One, the Big D, John the Dillinger? The lady in red got him out front of the Biograph in Chi town and the G-men put it to him … they buried old John under about a million tons of scrap iron, said they didn’t want his grave to become a shrine of some kind. Well, bullshit, Tobe, that was all crapperino, because the guy under the scrap iron could be your uncle Mike for all I know, but it sure ain’t John Dillinger, just like it wasn’t Dillinger in front of the Biograph. The thing was, the G-men had to get Dillinger or the Senate was gonna cut off the dough, kill Hoover’s Bureau. So they got a guy, called him Dillinger, and made a deal with the real Dillinger to be a good boy, keep quiet, and disappear—keep the dough, we’ll never prosecute you, just don’t spill the beans. So Dillinger lived the rest of his life in sunny Cal and the FBI is still with us—you get the picture? Okay, now, there’s a lesson there, like if the juice is big enough, there’s nobody who can stand up to it, which is where you come in. Whoever put paid to Goldie is in deep out here, and I can figure, conservatively, a thousand scenarios … say, the mob, or somebody somewhere holding some paper on the Roths, or on anybody big at Maximus, wants to pull off a bit of an object lesson, just to show what they can get away with. So they kill Goldie in a particularly gaudy way and frame the husband, somebody the Roths know to be innocent—well, the point is made, and you are the man in the middle … you take the fall, and everybody learns a lesson.” He sighed, still whispering, and swiping at his mouth with a fragile, soaked paper napkin. He had chili all over his fingers. “What was that last thing Goldie said to you? When she asked you to come out for dinner?”

“She said she had something on Aaron, she was going to fix that bastard once and for all.”

“Aha, see, that’s wrong!” He was waving his second chili dog at Challis. Outside, the rain drove straight downward, hammering at the parking lot. “She didn’t say anything to you about
Aaron …
she just said she was going to fix that
bastard.
In court nobody believed she said it at all—it was the desperate attempt of a murderer to throw up a mystery suspect, a straw man. Well, I figure you’re telling the truth, okay, but that still doesn’t mean it’s Aaron Roth. Jeez, look at the meatballs she runs around with. Half the coke sniffers and bondage freaks in Los Angeles … she hangs out at the Whisky and the Roxy and works out a week at a time down at La Costa, I’m telling you this lady is up to her ass in guys who qualify for the role of bastard … and murderer. And there’s Donovan, too, for God’s sake … a surfeit of bastards, and she could have been talking about any one of them. Come eat, eat.”

The chili tamale went away and he ate half the chili dog, drank half the orange. Nobody was paying any attention to them. He felt almost normal, but for the constant doubt making a home in his belly. Finally he said, “Don’t you know anything about anything that you should tell me? Any specifics? You and Ollie are full of all this other stuff, but how about a quick look at the real story? I
know
I’m in a mess.”

“Okay, all I hear is that there’s something going on between Donovan and Aaron Roth—don’t ask me what, because I don’t know. Except it’s got to do with money, probably dirty money of some kind. Vegas? Blackmail? I’ve got no names … just the connection. The thing is, what would bring them together? Jack was in Goldie’s camp, and that meant he wasn’t going to see much of Aaron—so Goldie’s dead, and suddenly Donovan and Aaron are an item.”

“It would help to know who Goldie was talking about when she last talked to me.”

“You are so quick, Tobe!” Schaeffer grinned crookedly across the mess on the table. “But so dumb. You’re not going to find out what they hid under their little pile of scrap iron, never. You’ve got to forget the whole thing, get lost. Your case is closed, baby. Permanently. You have got to locate the underground railway, the Big Escape Route—that’s where I can help. I know some cops who think you got greased but good, they’d fix your way out of it just for spite.”

“Ollie Kreisler said he could do it. He halfway convinced me,” Challis said. “Now you tell me you know a way—cops yet.”

“Shit, Tobe, nobody who counts ever has to pay up out here, you know that. Now, you are not exactly heavy on the clout scale, but you’ve got friends. Ollie can get you out, I might even be able to do it, and you haven’t even dropped your little bone of difficulty at the feet of Aaron Roth, who might be persuaded to roll you up in a rug and ship you somewhere just to get the whole thing over with. But there’s one small catch, of course. Go to the wrong guys for help—say, the guys who used Goldie to prove a point, if that’s the scenario—and you’ll find yourself at the beach in about six weeks, a leg wedged against a piling under the Santa Monica pier and your head up at Zuma.”

“That’s a catch, Pete.”

“So stop now, stay at my place, I’ll have a chat with my LAPD pals … or go tell Kreisler, yes, Ollie, anything you say, Ollie.”

Schaeffer followed him outside, walked him to the Mustang.

“What are you going to do, Tobe?”

“I think I might go poke around the beach house. Maybe there’s something there … from what happened in court, it didn’t seem to me that anybody even looked at Goldie’s stuff, her … stuff. If I know Aaron, he hasn’t gotten around to having anything done with it.”

“You mean you’re going looking for a clue,” Schaeffer said. “Shit, Tobe, that’s crazy. Where do you think they’re gonna go look for you?”

“They think I’m still up on the mountain. Half-dead.”

“Bullshit. They know you could be anywhere … it’s been days since the fuckin’ plane crashed. And you tell me you’re returning to the scene of your crime! Jeez, Tobe …”

Challis slid down into the front seat and turned the ignition.

C
HALLIS FELT THE FORCE OF
the rainwater that had rushed down out of the hills and was shoving crosswise at the Mustang as he headed west on Sunset Boulevard. The low spot halfway between the Beverly Hills Hotel and the East Gates of Bel Air was hubcap-deep in mud-thickened slush, and traffic was backed up in both directions. He waited it out and left the radio off, listened to the rain chewing at the raggedy top and the constant drip where it had gnawed through. Traffic opened up as he passed on through Pacific Palisades. Everybody was staying home. Theater marquees blurred in forlorn brilliance; the odd nightwalker sheltered in a doorway here and there. The smell of mud hung ominously in the air as he headed down the long, sloping highway which finally brought him to the sea and the Pacific Coast Highway.

Heading north was an ordeal. The bluffs overlooking the highway and ocean were collapsing in huge slabs, working their way steadily toward the expensive hilltop homes like a swarm of gnashing, unstoppable monsters. On the other side, over the sound of rain, the earth seemed to shake as the Pacific delivered one immensely heavy blow after another. Three times everything on the road stopped entirely where mud and stones and flower gardens and fencing had broken loose and crashed down across the north-bound lane. Dump trucks and bulldozers with twirling red lights on the cabs pushed and tugged and were loaded down under the rampaging tons of earth. Highway-patrol cars clustered on the outskirts of each mudslide and fed traffic past. Nobody here was going to waste time looking for Toby Challis. Compared to several thousand tons of mud, Toby Challis could be somebody else’s problem. Ahead of him, in the spinning red light, he saw a spoke of white picket fence protruding from a pile of mud like a scrawny human arm.

The lights in the shopping center on the far edge of Malibu across from the Colony flung that lonely, weary glow at the storm. A squash of cars, trucks, patrol cars, and TV panel trucks was clotted off to the left, trying to funnel on through into the private reserve. The trucks were loaded with sandbags and volunteers; the tires sank deep into the moist gravel and grassy mud. Challis worked his way into the mess behind a bulldozer being towed on a flatbed by a heavy cab. Looking out the window, the rain blowing in his face, he spotted old Artie Daniels at the Colony’s gatehouse. His bald bullet dome was covered by a yellow rubber rain hat, his body by a matching yellow slicker. The bulldozer edged on through. He pulled the Mustang even with Artie, who had too much on his mind to concern himself with checking the list. “Hi,” Challis called, looking directly into the familiar face. “Bob Roper, Asylum Records. Linda said she’d notify you—I’m gonna help her secure things, you know.”