Hollywood Gothic (22 page)

“Goddammit, Aaron!” Challis was on his feet, shouting, glaring down at the man in the hot swirling water. “Why don’t you
care?
What did she do to you that was so horrible that now you don’t care? She was your daughter.”

“Calm yourself, calm down. You’re under a great deal of pressure. The answer is, because she’s dead. She and I are not going to have a tender reconciliation this side of eternity. Because I didn’t like her and she hated me.” He reached for a goblet of Perrier water. Ice cubes clinked as he sipped. Over the rim his eyes regarded Challis calmly, unblinking.

“Was she blackmailing you? Is that it?” Challis felt his pulse quicken. “Were she and Donovan blackmailing you? Jesus, Aaron, is that it?” He smiled down at Roth, who carefully replaced his goblet on the tray. Was there a tremor in his hand? Or was it Challis’ imagination?

Suddenly he was aware of the whirring of the cable car, the faint grinding of the gears. Someone was coming.

“And where does your Laggiardi fit in? If Donovan isn’t quite your type, what is Laggiardi? What’s he got to do with Maximus? Is the mob muscling in on you? Maybe it was a threesome—Goldie, Donovan, and Vito Laggiardi? Where’s your little smirk now? Ah, Aaron, you’re so full of shit—”

“Shut up,” Roth snapped. “There’s somebody—”

“And who is Howard Laggiardi? Are they moving in on you, moving you out?”

“There’s somebody coming, you imbecile.”

The cable car drifted out of the fog. Like something from a Fellini film, there were two clowns in white face with bulbous red noses, black diamonds painted over their eyes, conical red hats perched atop orange fringes of fright wigs; they leaned out of the cars, mouths gaping in terrible smiles, hands waving.

Aaron Roth regarded them with a mildly apprehensive stare, reached slowly for another sip of Perrier and lime. “Lena … Bernie,” he said as they clambered down the steps. Lena was fat with double chins wobbling beneath the whiteface; there were several diamond rings on her pudgy fingers, and she carried a large Vuitton shopping bag. Bernie was lean, and even behind the makeup you could sense the solemn, sepulchral face of a Giacometti martyr. He wore French jeans and Gucci loafers and thirty or forty dainty gold bracelets on his thin, hairy wrist. Her jeans were too tight and a terrible mistake. They were the current hot therapists, shrinks to the stars. Whatever the stars did this season, whatever the outrage they were into, for a fee, Bernie and Lena would assure them that their behavior was, after all, okay. Clowns were in. Clown therapy was the answer.

“Aaron, darling,” Lena cried as she waddled toward the hot tub. “You call, we come. You’ll never know how much it means to Lena and Bernie that you don’t hesitate, that you call us when the hat is dropping … how are you, Aaron? You look tired, overworked, of course you’re all wet, and it’s not easy to see through all this smoke—”

“That’s steam, Lena,” Aaron said. “Hi, Bernie, hi, hi, hi …” He looked at Challis out of the corner of his eye, but no one was paying any attention to the man with the umbrella.

“Steam, smoke, borscht, I can’t see you.” She plopped down on a cedar bench and put the Vuitton bag between her feet. She blinked at Challis. “You,” she said. “What’s new?”

Challis shrugged.

“Well, I don’t see you around much anymore.”

“I guess not,” he said.

Bernie sat on the edge of the hot tub and lit a Dunhill pipe with a gold band. He sucked contentedly, not saying a word while Lena rummaged in her bag.

“Pressures,” Aaron Roth said. The tremor had traveled from his hand to his voice, making it sound thin, reedy. “I’ve been feeling a little pressure lately. Not enough sleep …”

“Remember, you’re a very important man, Aaron. Forget your humility for just a minute, stop trying to be so good, so caring, you should think about what’s good for Aaron Roth once in a while, start caring about Aaron Roth. Tell him, Bernie, he’s got to use the joy deep inside himself, bring it out, make people see that joy … the gift of happiness and joy, your greatest quality, you’ve got to let it shine through the troubles and cares of such an important man as Aaron Roth. Tell him, Bernie.” She rummaged on like a great fat scavenger.

“She’s right,” Bernie said, looking into the bowl of his pipe. “Lena’s right.” He cocked his head, blinked his protuberant round eyes, looked at Challis. “Do we know you? I have the feeling …”

“No, you don’t know me.”

“I’ve seen your face, but it was different. Somehow. I’m quite a physiognomist …”

“You don’t say.”

“Au contraire,
I do say.” He frowned and looked away.

“Clowns don’t smoke pipes,” Challis said.

“This clown does,” he said sourly, refusing to look back at Challis. He looked at Aaron. “Did you buy your clown suit yet?”

“I haven’t had time—”

“Naughty boy,” Lena said. She shook her sausagelike index finger at Roth. “What’s more important? Movies or happiness? Weekend grosses in Mobile or clowning? You need to improve your perspective … but you’re a lucky boy tonight. Lucky, lucky!” With a squat flourish she pulled a clown suit, a shiny, silky-looking garment in white with ballooning trousers and sleeves, red pompon buttons down the front, from the shopping bag. “Your own tailor-made clown suit! Your very own …” She kept pulling bits and pieces out of the bag. Challis couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Your own red nose … your own orange fright wig … your own makeup case … and … your own floppy shoes!”

“How much is all this costing?”

The outer husk of a clown lay all about the circular tub. Somewhere out there Challis knew there was a naked clown.

“Cost? How much does happiness cost? Joy? The life force … can you put a price tag on it? I don’t think so.”

“Try Lena …” Roth said. “Put a price tag on it for me.”

Roth’s fingers were drumming on the tub’s rim.

“Now, remember our key words, Aaron.” Lena was ignoring the price, babbling on. “Nonviolent. Cheery. Feeling good behavior mode. Life-giver. Life-enhancer. Repeat them …”

“I’ve read the book, Lena.” Roth looked markedly more tired than he had when the clowns arrived.

“You’re okay. The next step, you wear your clown suit to a meeting—all your executives should wear the clown suits. It’s the synthesis of all we know, the symbol of everything we’ve ever learned.”

Hacker stepped out of the shadows. Unheard, he’d come back, a kind of protective specter.

“It’s time to go now,” he said quietly, moving toward the Berkowitzes.

“Thank you, Lena, Bernie,” Roth said. “Thank you for coming. I feel much better.” He didn’t look it.

“Remember how we helped you after Goldie …” Lena began to shuffle backward, away from the cloud of steam, away from Tully Hacker. “We’ll always be here when you need us.”

“Thank you,” Roth said. His head floated on the water.

“Mr. Roth thanks you,” Hacker said calmly. “I’ll see you out. So very nice of you to come like this. Mr. Roth is tired …”

“You see that he wears his clown suit.”

“Of course, of course.” Somehow, as if he’d ensnared them in a vast net, Hacker was herding them away toward the cable car. Soon they were enveloped in the fog, the machinery was clanking.

Roth’s eyes blinked like a clockwork doll’s behind his steamy round spectacles. His arms floated before him, pale, with black tendrils of hair waving in the water. He seemed suddenly vulnerable, smaller and thinner than he’d been a few minutes before. The steel and irony had gone out of him. Rather than helping him, pumping him up with their idiotic bullshit, Lena and Bernie had drained him like a couple of vampires. The clown attire lay in a clump on a bench.

“If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you’d become a real wimp. What in the name of God was that all about?”

“Clown therapy. You saw it …” Aaron cleared his throat.

“Seeing is not necessarily believing. Why doesn’t someone murder them? The wrong people always—”

“I’m rather surprised someone hasn’t. They know all the secrets.”

“Don’t be despondent. You look terrible.”

“I haven’t been well. You wouldn’t understand, Toby—”

“Donovan and Laggiardi would make anyone sick. I don’t see why you can’t ease your conscience with me, get it off your chest.”

“Just drop that line entirely.” His voice came weakly from the pale face. “Why don’t you just escape—that’s what I can’t see.”

“I want to know about Goldie before I go … hell, if I do it right, Aaron, I won’t
have
to go. I’ll clear myself … and you don’t care enough to help me out. I come to you, I expose myself to capture and God knows what else, I trust you, and you won’t get me off square one.” Challis had moved all the way back to the sunken tub and was looking down at Roth, who seemed particularly fragile at just that moment.

“You sound crazy to me,” Aaron said. “Do you realize you’ve practically accused me of killing my own daughter?”

“Well, why not? Why else would you be so intent on covering up? I like the blackmailing theory, it makes a weird kind of sense to me … Goldie would have appreciated it as a technique, blackmailing her father, with Donovan and Laggiardi playing the enforcers.” Aaron was waving his hand at Challis, trying to make him stop. “But what could she have had on you? That’s what confuses me—what would you ever have let her get on you?”

“For God’s sake”—Roth’s voice came in a strangled monotone—“be quiet. We’re not alone … we’re not alone. …” His small bulbous eyes wavered across the deck toward a fog bank. He was right. Something was coming, and it was on all fours.

T
HE HUGE DOG STRAINED FORWARD
, sniffing: a Doberman the size of a Subaru, tongue askew, big paws slipping on the wet grass. He gurgled a trifle ominously when he saw Challis, let a bark roll about in his throat and cavernous chest before producing it as a silly Yorkshire-terrier yap. He looked a little silly, suddenly demure as he approached the hot tub like a professional wrestler afraid of smashing the china in an English tearoom. Standing stolidly in front of Challis, he began to lick the hand which reached out to pet his magnificent bony head.

“Towser,” Challis said, feeling the slippery tongue on his skin. “Good boy, Towser, good boy. …”

Behind the dog, emerging from the fog, was Solomon Roth, his wide mouth with its jagged coastline of old teeth drawn back in the familiar crocodile smile. His eyes were long and slightly slanted; his dark dyed hair was combed straight back from his forehead and hung loosely at the end of its journey, curling over the shawl collar of his white, initialed bathrobe. His eyebrows were black and bushy, like caterpillars, and there was a thicket of bristles in each ear. He padded along, bare feet pink and babylike, legs hairless from age. And always the predator’s grin which was anything but that: Solomon Roth was a great man.

“Why, Toby, it is you, isn’t it? It is Toby, Towser … you see, Towser knew you right off. It’s the smell, you can’t get rid of that like a beard, can you? You can’t fool Towser … Graydon told me you were here and I thought to myself, has old Graydon finally gone gaga? But he’s not the type, our Graydon, I’ll be gaga long before Graydon. Toby, I can’t believe it … let me look at you. Amazing. I would have passed you by on the street.”

He took Challis’ wet hand and gave it a firm, congratulatory shake, steered himself into a redwood deck chair, and seated himself slowly a few feet away. He saw the clown things and looked at his son. “Aaron, I’ve told you about those people. I don’t want them coming here …”

“It was all a mistake, Father,” Aaron said. He poured more Perrier into his goblet.

“That has been apparent for quite some time,” Solomon Roth said. Towser lowered himself in sections, got settled at his master’s feet. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived, Toby.” He took a Dunhill cigarette from the pocket of his robe, fitted it into a plain black holder, and lit it with a kitchen match he scraped on his thumbnail. It was a neat trick. “I’m going to have to ask you to tell your story all over again. I’m sure something can be done … absolutely sure.”

While he ran through it again, Challis tried to take Solomon Roth’s measure, tried to figure out what his position was likely to be. He’d never been quite sure of where Sol stood on certain kinds of issues—personal issues primarily, since his public attitudes were well documented. Solomon Roth was one of the pillars which had kept the film industry from falling to pieces during its various crises. When Sol arrived, you always had the feeling he was accompanied by the shades of D. W. Griffith and De Mille and Lasky and Goldwyn, all the great ones. But there was a difference, too. Sol Roth wasn’t going to wind up living out the years pinching floozies and starlets in a rundown hotel room like everybody says Griffith did. Sol Roth seemed not to carry the seeds of his own diminution, nor was he the brigand or killer that seemed to inhabit Hollywood’s Hall of Fame. He wasn’t a great moviemaker, either. What he was best at, better than anyone else had ever been, was keeping the idea of the movie business—his idea of the movie business—from disappearing altogether into the crud and crap the schlock merchants were always, always shilling. He had spent a lifetime playing fair and keeping his word. He made responsible pictures and funny pictures and American pictures. They may not always have reflected what America was like at a given moment, but they did reflect what Solomon Roth wanted America to be. And when television just about put paid to the movie business, Solomon Roth had refused to give up on Hollywood. He didn’t get into runaway productions, he didn’t piss and moan about the unions, and somehow he made both movies that were profitable and peace with television. The Maximus television wing was instantaneously profitable and the movie operation never left the black ink.

He had fought scandal and corruption in the movie business. He had kept Maximus clean. He had a Presidential Medal of Freedom and if he ever actually died, the Academy was sure to inaugurate a Solomon Roth Memorial Ward for something or other. He played a lot of golf with presidents, ex-presidents, and Arnold Palmer; he raised money for Israel and spastics and waifs. Solomon Roth was a moral imperative and his effect had never been accurately measured, except by the fact that the three interlocked Roman columns in the gladiator’s shield which had been the studio’s symbol from the very first day of its existence were as creamy white and spotless now as ever they had been. But Solomon Roth was seventy-nine years old, and as John Garfield used to say, “Everybody dies.”