Hollywood Gothic (16 page)

“Sure,” Challis said. “Everybody’s been fired.”

“Mmm.” He nodded. “But at fifty-four, to get dropped in the crapper at fifty-four, it’s gotta make you think. Texas … maybe I should head back to Texas. Christ, I can sell anything, not just ads—any-goddamn-thing, y’know?”

“Sure, I know.”

“Jesus Christ, you could put your eye out with a drink like this—little piece of wood in this umbrella thing.” He broke the parasol between two fingers and placed the gardenia carefully on the bar. “You a pal of Fast Jack Donovan? What’s your racket, anyway?”

“I’m an investigator,” he said, betting a long shot.

“Private?”

“Right.”

“Well, no shit. I knew a shamus once, poor bastard, couldn’t make a go of it, now he’s selling used cars in St. Joe, Missouri. Funny world. He was a shamus in Philly and then in Miami Beach. Damn near starved to death. Funny thing,” he mused, “old Clyde was a fairy. Nicest guy in the world, too. You starvin’? How’s business?”

“It’s good if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.” Challis had written that line for a movie that never got produced. No wonder.

“Well, you touch Fast Jack and you’ll get dirty, and that’s no lie.” He puffed hard, ground out the butt, finished the drink, signaled for another, and lit a second Lucky. He wasn’t even out of breath. “You workin’ for him? Or on him? Just like to know my footing, y’know.”

“On him. Client back in New York needs a check on current activities. I’m starting from scratch.” Challis shrugged, the question implied: what can you tell me, Hal, old buddy?

Buller’s new drink arrived and he took a quick sip. He broke the parasol, placed the gardenia beside the first. The bar looked like it was staring up at Hal Buller. “What do you want to know about Fast Jack? I’ve known him, what? Twenty years, I reckon. Twenty years … the middle of my fuckin’ life and I spent it with that miserable sumbitch.” He coughed, squinting at Challis through the smoke. He cupped a hand and drew the cigarette off his lower lip. “He fires me and then comes running down the hall asking if I need some money, says he could come up with five grand severance if I needed it—shit, I told him fuckin’ A I needed it, just send me a check. He will, too. Christ, I hope he burns forever in a fiery pit!” He let a laugh loose in his chest again, let it rattle around. “Fast Jack … you know what I mean,
fast?”
Challis nodded. “Well, he’s fast … he could throw a lamb chop past a wolf! Like old Bob Feller, the old Van Meter, Iowa, fireballer. You remember old Bob Feller, don’t you?” Challis nodded, remembering old Bob Feller just fine. “Well, he finally got the fast one past Hal Buller, and it took him twenty years to do it. I lasted twenty years, and now, pffft, the last fastball and he catches me flatfooted, pickin’ my nose, lookin’ at the third goddamn strike. And for what? The mick has to get rid of me because I went out on calls one day in a fuckin’ leisure suit! The mick hates polyester, coordinated shirts, white shoes and belts, but I had to wear that shit—my wife, goddamn pinhead, bought it for me, for Chrissakes. And anyway, I was down in Orange County calling on car dealers—man, they swear by those fuckin’ leisure suits down there, you’re an asshole if you don’t wear one.” He sighed and shook another Lucky out of the flattened pack. “So prickface mick bastard tells me it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, that I’m out of touch with the times, says—and I quote—he slaps me on the back, says, ‘It’s time to hit the trail, podner, it’s the last roundup.’ And him spending the morning kissing the Mafia’s ass.”

Zoot Sims had strapped on a big horn now, was rocking on the balls of his feet, the bottom of the sax cradled in his groin, blowing around the edges of “These Foolish Things.”

“The Mafia,” Challis repeated. “Everybody talks about the Mafia, sure, but talk and seventy-five cents will get you a cup of coffee. Right, Hal? My New York client is after something solid.”

“Come on, what’s solid? Where you been, man? There ain’t no such thing as solid in this town, you, me, Fast Jack—we all cover our tracks all the time. It’s the way the business works, publishing, movies, TV, it’s the same everywhere, you know that. I can give you some of the shit on Donovan—no charge, believe me, just give me your word, Bob, you’re gonna make it hot for the miserable shit heel—but forget solid, forget proving it.” He poured half of the funny drink down his gullet and gave Challis a big, sour, mean Texas grin. “You want the shit for your client, Bob, or you gonna turn it down?”

“I’m listening, Hal.”

“He’s listening. Way to go, Bob, way to go.” He disappeared in a cloud of smoke, and the cough hacked away, scraping the bottom of something.

“Is that office just a front? Cosmetic? Or is he really doing that well?”

Buller lit another Lucky and took a long look at Zoot Sims. “Go back a ways. Last year Jack’s girlfriend gets herself murdered—her ex-husband got it hung on him, that guy that’s in the papers now, poor dumb sumbitch. Well, Jack’s girlfriend was the only daughter of Maximus Pictures, so I figure Jack was in pretty tight with Aaron Roth—you follow me? Okay. With the daughter dead and her old husband going over for it, Roth was suddenly all alone—now people said he and the daughter didn’t get along worth shit, but who knows? I ask you. And Roth and the old husband were supposed to have been pretty good friends, the guy was a screenwriter, worked for Roth at Maximus, the usual incestuous Hollywood number, right? So with one of ’em dead and the other in the klink, Donovan moves in on Roth … brought together by their grief, you might say. Christ!” He frowned at the remains of his drink and flapped his hand at the bartender, pointed at the mug. Challis shook his head, indicating he had plenty left. Zoot Sims had moved on to “The Moon Was Yellow.” Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
flickered in Challis’ head.

“Donovan’s got about as much emotion as a rattlesnake,” Buller continued. “No grief, no nothing, but it was his chance to close in on his girlfriend’s father. What if Roth and his daughter hadn’t gotten along? Death heals all wounds, y’know, Bob, old fella, old shamus? Sure you do, you been around. You got a face that’s, y’know, been around. So Fast Jack sucks up to the Roths, Aaron falls for it, being a silly-ass movie tycoon with no sense at all, and I figure Maximus is now financing Donovan’s rag. An alliance of the grief-stricken, but Jack’s got ’em hypnotized—they haven’t caught on to him yet. Christ, Donovan hasn’t got a pot to piss in that’s not leased … the 450SL, the penthouse on Sunset, that goddamn yacht he spends most of his time on. Shit! It could all disappear tomorrow.” He tied into his new drink. The bar had sprouted a third eye. “Whattaya think of that? Make your client happy?”

“Who knows what will make a client happy? All the answers and a bill that gets lost in the mail. … You mentioned the Mafia. I don’t get the connection, Hal.”

Hal squeezed the last Lucky out of the pack and lit it, grinning, enjoying himself, innocent in a peculiar way, full of healthy malice. “This part of the story goes back to New York, and my details are sketchy. But the basics are guaranteed by yours truly. Somewhere along the line with one of his goddamn newspapers or magazines, maybe it was his scheme to do in-flight magazines for the small feeder lines—somewhere Donovan went in hock to the dude in his office today, Vittorio Laggiardi … a mick and a wop, they deserve each other. But guys like Laggiardi use guys like Donovan for batting practice, y’know? Vito’s probably got the acetylene torch to Donovan’s nuts this very minute, and loud screams are music to Vito’s ears—ya get it, Bob? I don’t know the details, but I know what I see, and Donovan is wedged between Maximus on one side, since they’re putting up the money for
The Coast,
and Vito on the other, because Vito holds a ton of markers. And Laggiardi visits out here once a week and he’s a New York hood, he hates to leave the Big Apple. … And there’s something about a new kid moving into a big job at Maximus, some kid Vito knows or likes or owns, I’m not sure. It could be Maximus TV, but I’m fuzzy on this, so don’t quote me.

“But Fast Jack’s on the tightrope … so what does the bastard do? He fires Hal Buller. It’s like having a lousy day and going home and kicking the shit out of the dog. So, Bob, old buddy, welcome to what I know. I hope your client can use it. Tell him to leave it sticking out of Donovan’s back, okay? That’ll be payment enough for Hal Buller, you better believe it.”

Buller was growing weary, resting his deeply lined, shaggy-browed head in the palm of a hand, staring at the three gardenias on the shiny bar. He subsided into a silence laced with heavy, rasping inhalation, the breathing of an overage, out-of-shape, three-pack-a-day man. Challis nursed the melting ice in the bottom of the cheap, fancy mug, watched as Zoot Sims and his companions wandered away from the stage. He kept looking at Goldie and Donovan in his mind, trying to get them and their relationship straightened out. Goldie was on one track and Donovan on another, and at some point they met, interacted, and Goldie began making all those jabs at her datebook. It seemed to Challis that they were not simply friends, or lovers: those notations were something else, full of business and impatience and pressure.

Did Donovan know the truth she had planned to tell Toby that last night? And where, really, did Donovan fit into the larger picture—not simply with Goldie, but with whatever his Maximus connection actually was? And how many lives had Donovan actually led? As a gossip columnist/leg man he’d been instrumental in running Morgan Dyer’s father. In New York he’d sold some part of his soul to Laggiardi, and once those guys had a piece of you, you never quite got it back. Was Donovan really a new satellite circling Maximus? Had he jumped the fence around Aaron Roth: had grief, as Buller had said, brought the two of them together? Challis sneaked a peek at Buller, whose heavy-lidded frog’s eyes had drooped almost shut. It wasn’t worth getting him started again, but the grief-stricken union of Donovan and Roth lacked the quality of verisimilitude which distinguished good work from hack: it was tough to throw such a wild improbability past an old screenwriter. … But how did Goldie and Donovan have Aaron Roth in common? That would take some answering.

Watching Buller slowly fall asleep in the dark quiet of the bar, Toby Challis wondered what came next. There was no reason Donovan would see him. What good was access to anyone else going to do him? It wasn’t a movie and he wasn’t a detective and he was confused, awash in details he couldn’t quite connect, and scared to death that someone would come running at him from behind a bush, screaming his name and asking for a reward.

He paid for all the drinks, stood up feeling stiff and rumpled, and left.

He went back outside into the encompassing grayness, where the wind was still trapped in the patio courtyard, thrashing the awnings and snuffling at his trouser legs. He went inside the hotel’s lower level. A man coming out of the liquor store had a fresh copy of the
Herald-Examiner
and the front page leaped at Challis:
“WHERE IS THIS MAN?”
Beneath the headline, a full-page photograph of his face, thankfully bearded, stared at the world. “Storm Coverage Inside” ran along beneath his picture. He went into the drugstore and bought a copy, folded it over, fished out a dime, and went to the bank of telephones across the hallway. He found the piece of paper in his shirt pocket and dialed. She answered the telephone crisply.

“Morgan, it’s me, Toby you-know-who. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, you get the picture?” He swallowed dryly. “I need help.”

M
ORGAN DYER’S HOUSE CLUNG LIKE
a misplaced New England saltbox to one of the hillsides rising wetly above the Sunset Strip. Gaping, deep wounds had been gouged from the muddy hills by the virtually unceasing rain, giving the mountain range the look of something very old and decomposing. Somewhere underneath it all the great plates tying the planet together were shifting microscopically, building up to the one mighty, inevitable shove which could make her fine little house a traffic hazard on Sunset. The palms waved good-bye, slowly and without energy in the wind drifting lazily in the canyons, as he rounded the last sharp curve and pulled into her narrow driveway, stopped beneath the latticework weighed down with curling bougainvillea. Challis sagged in the driver’s seat for a moment, feeling the tiredness, the letdown that comes with the notion that you’re home safe.

She came outside to greet him, smiling, her mouth wide and a gap showing between her front teeth. She was wearing faded Levi’s, a green tanktop, and no shoes, and she hugged his arm, watching his eyes. “Come on in, I’ve got a pitcher of tea—I’m mainly an iced-tea person, year round. Coffee gives me the willies. How are you? Are you all right?” She took his hand and pulled him inside, through the wide living room and onto the patio with Los Angeles stretching out below. “Just a second—and help yourself to the tea.” He poured a glassful with ice cubes clinking and followed her out into the backyard. The wind was picking up, smelled of rain. The fringe of awning over the patio, faded canvas that had once been bright green and orange, flapped in warning. She was standing by the small oblong swimming pool fishing for leaves with a net. Waves lapped at the sides, leaves eddying along the gutters. A tiny faded brown bikini bathing suit lay in two pieces beside a chaise longue. She squatted at the pool’s edge and snared the last clump of brown leaves. Watching her, Challis felt a strong sexual urge, the first in a long time. Worry, fear, jail—they had laid his sex drive to rest, but he wanted to touch her.

“There,” she said, dropping the net on the lawn, which was long and silky, needed mowing. “Come here, look at this.” He followed her back to the chain-link fence at the back of her property, all but obscured by vines. “I’ve been taking crud out of that damn pool for two days, and the crud is gaining on me!” As she spoke, a gust of wind whipped leaves across the grass. “Look,” she said, pointing. Beyond her fence the hill was disintegrating. Several hundred feet below, a swimming pool was full of collapsed hillside. Several men stood around looking at the mess. “If we survive the rain, the fire danger will be all the worse next year—the weeds and grasses will grow all the faster and get just as dry. Dante would have understood.” She looked at the ridges of houses and streets layered one atop the next on the canyon wall opposite. “All the circles, ready-made, waiting for the fire.” She laughed. “Sorry. This is no place to be philosophical. Let’s go inside, the rain’s going to start any minute.”