Hollywood Gothic (28 page)

The little bastard-Spanish stucco was so worn and chipped that it blurred into the thick furry fog. A scruffy palm that needed trimming listed until it had finally come to rest like a bleary old wino against the cracked red tile roof. A bus stopped in front of the house, picked up a woman wearing a snood, wheezed blackness out of its backside, and ground on down the wide, empty street. Challis parked the Mustang behind a mailbox. He was sweating in the thick humidity.

“I called Vernon early this morning,” he said. “I told him that it was indeed me, and Vernon just laughed. Vernon looks at life’s passing parade and just doesn’t give a shit. So relax … dammit, I forgot to tell you to wear a gas mask. If you can’t take it after a while, just step outside. It’s not fatal.”

Vernon Purcell, five-foot-eight and three hundred pounds, met them at the door wearing clothes he hadn’t changed in a month. He had lived in them, eaten in and on them, bathed his seventeen black cats while wearing them, and slept in them. His thin gray hair was plastered straight back from his pale, fleshy face, giving him a youthful, innocent quality, though he was pushing seventy. There was a brown crust at the neckline of his heavy T-shirt which seemed at first glance to be an extra chin crease. He smiled at Challis, his eyes floated sleepily, and the first shock wave of his peculiar scent hit them. Morgan turned her head and coughed into her fist. Kitty litter? Sweat? Cooking smells?

“Tobias,” he said, his voice a still-strong tenor, “I never thought I’d see you again. How long has it been? Ten years? Twelve? Come in, both of you … you’re just in time to see me put the finishing touches on an oddity.” He parted the sea of black cats. To the left the kitchen rotted, dozens of plates speckled with fossilized pork chops and scrambled eggs and tacos, all developing a growth of mold. Dishes of cat food; one small ragged-looking animal bathed in the water dish. “Over here, an original four-color poster from
The Sun Also Rises …
Ty Power, Miss Gardner, Eddie Albert, Flynn at his best, and young Robert Evans.” Purcell stood back and viewed the poster, which was framed under glass, hooking his thumbs in his pockets, rocking on his heels. “Found this in a junk shop in Petaluma. Mounted it on white linen, painstaking work, and I have to keep the cats from walking all over it, but now it’s worth eight-hundred and fifty dollars to a collector in Santa Barbara.” He stood back admiring the poster, which was garish and appealing. “And so it goes. The years pass, Tobias, and now they’re all pretty much the same. Which is just the way I wanted it.”

“I finally wore out my soundtrack from that picture,” Morgan said.

“Tobias? A fellow collector?”

“The lady I mentioned on the phone.”

“Of course, Dyer’s daughter.” He smiled at her and creased his bulk ever so slightly in the hint of a bow. “Your father’s picture
Man in the Fog
had a wonderful poster. Quite a demand for it. I sold one in mint condition to a Japanese collector about a year ago. Two thousand simoleons—my way of getting back at them for Pearl Harbor.” He wheezed like a man with ground glass and Elmer’s glue clogging his throat. “Miss Dyer, I have become a human archive, a repository—or refuse dump, maybe—of movie history, paraphernalia, trivia, a resource, if you will. Perhaps Tobias has recounted to you my bizarre story. I was once somebody in this town, but I suppose the industry, the profligacy of it, the waste and the sorrow of the reality of it, I suppose it wore me down … too many years in the sun, you finally go crazy—that is, if you have any brains at all. Instead of wandering off to a mountaintop and howling at the moon, instead of going religious, I finally discovered that the movies themselves are what matters about the business—not the poor jerks and fools and greedmongers and ruined idealists and outright criminals who make them. Not even the good, decent people who somehow survive and succeed—they aren’t what matters. They aren’t important to anyone but themselves … it’s the movies that matter. And I know more about them than I should. For instance, I’ve got six soundtracks of
The Sun Also Rises
in the original wrappers, never played, and one is for you. … Coffee? Tea?”

The mustiness of the room seemed to suck the breath from their lungs. Both Challis and Morgan declined, sat down carefully on a cat-hair sofa, and waited while Purcell waddled off to the kitchen and added the smell of steaming tea to the overall miasma.

“Are you okay?” Challis whispered.

“Mmm.” She kept her mouth tightly closed, rolled her eyes.

A large black cat with green eyes like pumpkin seeds wormed its way out from under a stack of ancient, dusty
Hollywood Reporters.
The animal’s face was festooned with dust and cobwebs. There were two Mickey Mouse lamps at the end of a leatherette couch which belonged in a rundown bus depot. A perfect framed poster of
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
was propped against a six-foot-high stack of forties press kits; the poster was a masterpiece, all the copy and art laid over a blueprint.

Purcell wedged his way back through a wide archway stacked tight with newspapers, file folders, books about movies, and the dented fender of an old Thunderbird. He sipped tea from a Porky Pig mug and handed Morgan the soundtrack recording. “In fond memory of your father, my dear. One of the industry’s very good, very decent men, and you may quote me on that.” He wheezed mightily and lowered himself into a wicker porch chair that had once been apple-green. Over the years the apple had spoiled, gone bad. Creamy tea dribbled over the rim, ran down Porky Pig, and added several more splotches to his grim plaid shirt. “Now, Tobias, you mentioned that you had a question for me.” He rubbed the stubble on his face. The only life in his face came from his tiny eyes, waiting for the question, the challenge.

“Morpeth,” Challis said.

“Ah, poor Morpeth …” Purcell slurped his tea, wiped his mouth with the long sleeve of his undershirt, which projected from beneath the rolled back cuff of his plaid shirt. “Morton Alexander Morpeth, born 1920, died 1947, a man of little consequence and therefore largely unnoticed in our little community. His demise created a very minor stir, mentioned in passing for a day or two at Romanoff’s, the Brown Derby, Schwab’s. Then he slipped into the unimportant past.”

“What happened to him, Vernon?”

“Well, it’s a strange story, if you have a moment?” He raised his eyebrows, which appeared to have been both greased and plucked. Challis nodded, motioned him onward. “Morty Morpeth was a member of the postwar English community, which stuck together fairly closely in those days. I only met him once, as I recollect, he was a lean, tallish gent, one of those
sandy
Englishmen. Bit of an adventurer, something of a hero in North Africa with Montgomery … he’d seen a lot and he gave the impression that there were things going on under the surface that you might not want to know about—there were a lot of men who came back from the war who gave off that sort of aura. A bright, literate young man. I remember asking him what he thought about Southern California, and he surprised me by quoting my own favorite novelist—that of course, would be J. B. Priestley. He said he agreed with Priestley, who had summed it up, ‘We’ve more nutty people to the square mile here than anywhere on God’s green earth. … It’s just one big loony bin.’ Well, you had to like a fellow who could come up with that on the spur of the moment.”

One of the cats sidled across Purcell’s mountainous chest and abdomen, stretched his long black neck, licked up some tea from the mug. The cat looked up, fur on his head spiky and greasy like a punk-rocker, and ran his tongue along his whiskers.

“But you couldn’t ignore this somewhat shady quality about him. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cookie? There must be some English muffin somewhere …”

“No, really, Vernon, it’s all right. Go on.”

“Well, Morty had a minor position as a studio accountant, which seemed somewhat amusing, because he looked like such an active, rascally fellow, glint in his eyes, kind of a handsome smirk … but he’d been in training in the Korda organization as a teenager before the war, had shown an ability to work with figures. Then, one day in the late spring or summer of 1947, Morty Morpeth disappeared. Who would have cared? People run off all the time, go home, float off into the Pacific. But one very hot dry day there was a serious brushfire in one of the canyons above Beverly Hills, lots of wind swirling around, movie stars’ homes endangered, sirens going off all day, the same old story. The authorities had to make a thorough sweep through the burned hillsides looking for any bodies, any human remains of any kind. They found two, a child of about five, and a man who, as you can predict, turned out to be Morty Morpeth. At first they couldn’t identify him … he was naked, but he was only a little singed at the edges, not burned to blackened bones. And the police discovered that he hadn’t died of anything related to the fire … he had died of a bullet fired at close range into his skull.” Another cat clambered clumsily toward the tea, and Purcell gently pushed him away, muttering, “Now, now, Horace, you know you don’t like tea. … Naturally the discovery of the body, which had been stuffed down into a natural rocky depression and partially covered with rocks—well, this was news. Who the dickens was he? Well, the police began to comb their missing-persons files, began to call relatives and friends of missing persons to come down to the morgue and have a gander at the remains of Mr. X.

“Inevitably the wheel turned round and round, and it was Mrs. Morpeth’s turn—”

Morgan swallowed a gasp, asked through clenched teeth, “Do you know Mrs. Morpeth’s first name?” She coughed behind her hand.

“Prudence, I seem to recall … Penelope … I’m not quite sure. It’s all in my newspaper-cutting file. Y’know, Tobias, I’m rather surprised you don’t know all this. I mean, after all …”

“What are you talking about, Vernon? I’m no movieland wax historian.”

“No, no. The Maximus connection!” He sighed, pursed the tiny lips in the vast gray reaches of his face, clasped his fat hands across his tummy, and slowly ripened. “Morpeth was a Maximus employee … I’d have thought you’d know the lore there.”

“No, Vernon, I don’t recall it ever coming up.” He felt his breath shortening, his adrenaline giving an extra squirt.

“Well, no matter. Simon Karr did a better job than I’d thought. Simon was a public-relations specialist, a free-lance, who specialized in keeping things out of the paper, and Maximus—I suppose Solomon Roth—hired him to put the lid on the Morpeth murder. You know how Solomon is, wants nothing bad to speckle the Maximus shield, and a murder—a particularly mysterious and publicized murder—is bad, a ton of mud about to slop all over the shield. So Simon Karr went to work with his contacts, and they included everybody, people at the
Times,
the morgue, the LAPD, everybody. Greased a half-dozen palms, I suppose, and the whole thing went to the dead-letter office.”

“What did I tell you about Vernon?” Challis said to Morgan. “He was bound to know … but one thing, could you check your file for Morty Morpeth’s wife’s name? It’s important.”

“Get down, my little kitties.” He pushed himself forward, to the edge of the couch, and gritted his teeth deep within his suet face. He waddled to a corner of the room where the cardboard boxes, tattered and torn, bulged with soiled manila folders, covered unfinished wooden shelving, the top of an ancient Philco radio-phonograph; piles of the cartons tilted precariously toward the ceiling, completely blocking one window. He turned on a table lamp, and the grass skirt on the hips of a hula dancer began to rotate slowly. He took a fringed, motheaten pillow with the silk lettering “Honolulu 1941” from the top of one box and dropped it on a nosy cat. “Here it is,” he wheezed. “Very incomplete.” He thumbed through the slim file. “But the woman … the woman … aha, I was close, by gum. Priscilla, that was her name, Priscilla Morpeth.” He offered the file to Challis, who took it, began to read. Morgan got up and stood looking over his shoulder.

“Say, I’ve just thought of something else,” Purcell interrupted. “The story that got out and went the rounds, strictly word of mouth, was that Morpeth had embezzled a million bucks from Maximus. Sure, it comes back to me.” A cat shrieked as Purcell trod on its tail, but he took no notice. “Morpeth embezzled the million—and it struck me as not unlikely, given the charming-scoundrel impression he’d made on me—and that his colleagues in rascality had shot him and taken the money for themselves.” He shrugged. “Sounded good when I heard it in one studio commissary after another. Hung together beautifully. And Roth certainly wouldn’t have wanted that to get into the papers. Make Maximus look like damned fools … a million was a hell of a lot of money in 1947. The only problem with the story was that it was too good, do you see? Perfect. And I knew that Simon Karr had been working on it day and night for a week or two. Two and two always make four in Karr’s world. … In the real world”—he chuckled—“it’s usually five or nine or seventeen. Get it? I think the whole thing was Simon’s exercise in creative writing. That’s all we did then anyway, make up stories. Do you see my point, miss? The one cardinal rule about movie people—all of them, the best and the worst, the kind and the cruel, the decent and the plain criminals—you must realize that they always lie. Not often, not merely almost always, but
invariably.
It’s part of the business. They lie from good motives and bad. They lie to convince you … or themselves … or somebody who just happened to walk into the room. It’s their nature. They’re like children, and as often as not you shouldn’t even hold it against them. You know they’re lying. They know they’re lying. The truth never occurs to them. So Simon Karr took his job seriously, was paid a great deal of money for muddying the waters, and made up this wonderful tidy lie.” He sneezed, stuck out his tongue, and tweezed some hair out of his mouth. “Fur balls. That’s the problem with cats. They get fur balls all the time … they’re like cows with their cuds, they’ve all got big wads of fur in their tummies. Live with them, you’re going to get fur balls, too. It’s in the air.” He slid his sneakered foot under a medium-sized cat, slowly lifted it off the floor while steadying himself on the arm of a broken chair, and flipped the cat through the air. It passed Challis’ head, looked around with only a hint of mild concern, and landed calmly on a pile of books and newspapers. Purcell looked at Morgan and Challis apologetically. “It’s the only exercise I get. I have phlebitis in my other leg.”