Hollywood Gothic (32 page)

The lock had gotten rusty, but a little patience and Three-in-One oil did the job. The swimming suits were growing mold, and a variety of spiders had set up housekeeping. It was the perfect spot. He worked quickly with Morgan standing guard on the patio, keeping an eye out for the enemy, whoever it might be. Through the fog he glimpsed a team of men trying to shore up the hillside beneath a white villa. The owner looked down at them from the remains of his terrace.

Challis locked the door again and went back to the house, through the wet leaves and grass. Morgan had put her glasses on, as if they helped her think through difficult problems. “Are you still scared?” she said, touching his arm.

He shrugged. “I think I’m scared for good. Let’s get going.”

“Where? I’ve been thinking and … well, I don’t know what to do.”

“Think about the diaries—it’s all we’ve got to think about anymore. I’m terribly confused and my brain is damn well going on strike if I try to tie this all together one more time. But we have got a time limit, two time limits actually—Vito’s and the cops’. And we’ve got the diaries. The only thing about the diaries that makes no sense to us is all those checks—Priscilla Morpeth, God love her. We know her husband got killed, but why the checks? Were they just charity? But if they were, why would Goldie have felt responsible for keeping up the charity? And even if she did it for the memory of her mother, something to keep the continuity … why the hell should Jack Donovan keep paying? That’s what I can’t figure out.” She nodded; Challis went on: “So there’s nothing left for us to do but keep pushing against what we don’t know—Priscilla Morpeth. And Herbert Graydon is the fellow who befriended her, identified Morty Morpeth’s body—”

“And Tully Hacker,” she said, “covered the whole thing up. Okay, let’s go.” She hugged his arm. That was all.

The Mustang nosed fearlessly into the narrow corridor between the grasping leaves and green, sinewy arms of the vegetation, negotiated the turnaround without slamming into one of the Rolls convertibles and a white Stutz that had put down an anchor in a widening puddle. Behind the pink walls and gray shutters, lamps blurred in the late-afternoon fog shroud but you didn’t get the feeling that there was life in there. In the stillness their feet crunched loudly on the wet gravel. No one had picked up the tricycle. Herbert Graydon answered the door, his impassive face adjusting to accommodate what was for him a warm smile.

“Come in, come in, Mr. Challis,” he whispered, his head turning quickly to check the foyer. “You just missed them … they left not more than ten minutes ago.”

“Who, Herbert?”

“The police, I’m afraid. They were here to talk with Mrs. Roth. From what I gathered, it was concerning the possibility that you might show up … they were circumspect but I got the impression that they had some kind of new lead. But nothing specific.”

“The Donovan thing,” Morgan said softly. Challis introduced her, and Herbert’s face brightened again.

“I worked with your father, Miss Dyer. A fine man … and a great pleasure to meet you.” He shook her hand. “Mrs. Roth is soaking in a hot tub. What, may I ask, are you doing here? I don’t think this is altogether a safe place for you to be, sir.”

“We’ve got to talk.”

“But not here in the foyer,” Herbert said. “Follow me.”

At the end of a dim corridor, not far from the kitchen, he ushered them into a comfortable, book-lined room overlooking the terraces that led down toward the turquoise glow that was the pool. “My private quarters,” he said softly, closing the door. “Not a bad life for a broken-down old actor. All the books I want, color TV, good antiques—sit down. Sherry? Something stronger … a damned stiff shot?” His manner had changed, the performance of the faithful family retainer abruptly shed. He nodded, poured three stiff shots of Glenlivet, and sat down across from them in a shiny leather club chair with brass studs. He unbuttoned the black alpaca coat, lit a deeply colored meerschaum pipe, and leaned back as if he were moving on into the character of a kindly old professorial type. “Now, then, what’s this all in aid of? How can I help out?” He sucked the pipe and tamped it down with a stubby index finger.

“Do you have a good memory, Mr. Graydon?”

“Why, yes, miss, I pride myself on my memory. Runs in the family—my father was a dustman in Wolverhampton, then London, and he never forgot a client, regulars on his route—and I’m the same way, if I do say so myself.”

“All right,” Challis said. “Tell us about Morty and Priscilla Morpeth.”

“Love a duck!” he exclaimed, jowls quivering. “That’s a bit close to the bone, it is … you’ve heard about the man who befouled his own nest? Well, then, there you are!” He puffed intently. “That’s all best forgotten, sir. Long, long time ago, it was. What’s it signify for you, eh?” The eyes watched alertly from the massive face. The pipe stem clicked against his teeth.

“Herbert, listen to me. It’s a long story and there just isn’t time to go into it. But I’ve talked with Vernon Purcell and Simon Karr today—”

“Simon Karr—good Lord in heaven, surely he’s dead! He must be dead.”

“Not quite yet. But the point is, everything I need to know to get me out of this mess points back thirty years, to Priscilla Morpeth—I don’t know how or why, I don’t know what the connection is, but it has to do with Priscilla Morpeth and maybe her husband. Simon Karr told us that you were close to them, that you went with Priscilla and identified the body. Herbert, just tell us about it … I really haven’t got anyone else to go to and I’m pretty well worn out. The cops are getting closer, Donovan’s dead and they’re gonna think I killed him, and I’m running in circles. Vito Laggiardi wants to cut my eyeballs out …”

“The man is a cur,” Herbert said, “an irredeemable cur. You have my word on that.”

“I don’t need your word on that, Herbert, only on the Morpeth—”

“All right, then! You shall have it. After the war, we had something of an English community here in Hollywood, as you know. We would meet, talk over old times, mostly theater and film woolgathering, somebody would do up fish and chips, and we’d natter on about things in general. Morty Morpeth was a young fellow but he had a certain quality about him, he was like a fictional character, if you see what I mean. Some of the actors watched him, went to school on him, as we used to say … if he’d been a character in a film, Niven would have made a good Morpeth. Or Ray Milland … good-looking, dashing—he really was one of the Desert Rats, y’know, plenty of decorations, had been at El Alamein with Montgomery. But he was shady, which is what gave him so much charm, what? Isn’t that so often the way? He made no bones about having been in the black market in Cairo and Alexandria, for example. And the stories the chap could tell—curl your hair … said he’d become an accountant before the war because he liked playing with sums. You’ll never get any of the money, he used to say, unless you get close enough to the money to smell its breath. Well, he was a charming, colorful bloke and the actors took to him … and Aaron Roth was quite amused by him—I think Aaron saw a kind of daring in Morty that he didn’t have himself … that sort of sneaking admiration can draw men together. I saw the two of them out drinking together a few times, very odd thing for a man in Aaron’s posish to do, out mucking about with Morty. Morty was always out on the town with men you’d have thought wouldn’t have time for him. But they genuinely liked him. Errol Flynn, for instance, he was always buying Morty drinks and they’d gab on and on for hours. …

“He had this peculiar little wife who came along sometimes, she was English, too. I think he’d married her in Cairo or someplace like that right after the war. Anyway, she had curly red hair, like coils of copper wire, big floppy lips, a robust figger, a habit of wearing rather more jewelry than was good for her, strange blue eyes that could stop you cold and make a believer of you … an odd woman … those eyes, she claimed she could see the future and she enjoyed quite a vogue at various times, as a kind of seer—at regular intervals, y’know, Hollywood goes quietly mad over the latest seer. Used to, anyway. … God, the memories, please forgive me.” The pipe smoke curled around his face, hung in the still dry air. A Meissen clock ticked on a bookshelf. He had touched a button on a small tape deck and Chopin waltzes tinkled softly, very softly in the background. “She was having one of her periods of success … and then Morty disappeared and the next thing we all knew he was dead. It was all very shocking because he’d been so extraordinarily alive, but when you got to thinking about it, it wasn’t so surprising after all. Remember the black market? Remember wanting to be near the money? Well, you see how it all began to make a kind of sense … the story made the rounds among the movie people that he’d embezzled a lot of money from Maximus, and Aaron was in a certain amount of hot water with Solomon Roth for having hired him in the first place. Admittedly, Morty was not the old man’s kind of bloke. And then Simon Karr was hired to keep it all quiet—he came to see me because I’d identified the body, seen the bullet wound, heard them talking about it at the morgue—Simon asked me to please not discuss it with anyone, particularly the columnists and such.”

“Did he offer you any money?”

“No, Toby, he didn’t, though I think he would have if I’d hinted a bit. But I’d done some pictures at Maximus, always been well treated there, and I saw no reason to noise the story about … and the Roths never forgot my attitude, though they’d never spoken about the matter to me. When I let it be known that I was considering going into service if the arrangement was one I liked, Solomon Roth called me, said he would consider it an honor if I would even entertain the idea of coming here … well, I was flattered and I’ve never regretted it. There have been some difficult times, of course, particularly when Mrs. Roth—the first Mrs. Roth—was unwell, but every family has its unhappy moments, I’m sure.” He cleared his throat, relit the meerschaum. “It was at the time of Morty’s murder that I also met Tully for the first time … he was very helpful to the family, I understand. Certainly the story never made any headlines, and I’m sure Tully was right—Morty was greedy, got his hands on the money, and had a falling-out with his gangland chums … his reward, a bullet in the brain. Very sad.”

“Did you still see Priscilla?” Morgan asked.

“Oh, my, yes, frequently for a time. She had another vogue a year or so after Morty’s death, and, vogue or not, she was always there, on the fringe. Hollywood’s full of those people, has been for as long I can remember. She used to go to parties which, for one reason or another, I’d also attend. I remember she had a crystal ball, the complete paraphernalia, and was still in the fortune-telling business—I saw her once at Eddie Robinson’s house, she was set up at a table with the crystal ball, wearing a kind of costume, and all of Eddie’s incredible paintings on the walls … Manet, Monet, Degas, Utrillo—what a setting! I liked Priscilla, I liked the way she made a go of it on her own. I’d drop in at her shop on Sunset for a cuppa now and then, she always had the teapot on a little gas ring, and I’d tell her about my career, tell her if I was worried—oh, yes, I admit it, I asked her about the future—and she advised me a bit, told me finally that it was TV or nothing. I couldn’t face that. I even took Treacher with me to see her once, but you know him, looking down from this great height and telling me I was an imbecile to put any faith in the word of someone who belonged in an asylum, but that was just the way he was, y’see. She’d go into a bit of a trance and maybe she was batty, but we were close friends for a few years … after Morty’s death she turned to me, maybe because I wasn’t a big star, I can’t say. Very fond of her, I was. Another peculiar thing, for some years after Morty’s death, she told me she was communicating with him from the great beyond, that’s what she called it, as if it had capital letters, the Great Beyond, and she said he had terrible things to tell her about his death, awful things, but she never told me what they were. … Then, you know how it is, the years passed and made fools of us all, eh? What difference had any of it made, that we’d been here at all, eh? I lost touch with Priscilla, oh, I heard of her now and then, but once I was out of the business and my old friends began to die off, well, it’s the old story, isn’t it? Let’s see, I last saw Priscilla about ten years ago. Ran into her on Hollywood Boulevard, she was coming out of Larry Edmunds’ Cinema Bookstore—she had her arms full of a great number of books about the movie business, said she was thinking about writing her memoirs and wanted to read some, sort of get the hang of it—she sounded a little bit crazy, that high-pitched voice of hers, but those blue eyes were bright and clear. She was about fifty then, I expect, wearing an old fox fur around her throat, a flowered print dress, hair all curly and red but with a little gray in it … she looked just like a weird middle-aged woman who belongs on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“Then she’d only be sixty now,” Morgan said.

“Where is she, Herbert?”

“Well,” he said, “it was ten years ago, and you know how people move around out here. But she said she’d just left a trailer park down in Orange County and headed up the coast past Malibu … she said she’d found a fine place.” He paused and tugged at his pipe with a smooth, powerful fist.

“Come on, Herbert, goddammit.”

“Coincidence always makes me nervous,” he said. Fingers of rain tapped at the window. “She said her trailer park, the one she was newly settled in, was up in the hills above the coast, halfway between Esterville and … Castle Moon Bay.”

Morgan said, “You don’t know how little we have to go on, Mr. Graydon. Anything is … something. Now we’ve got two connections between Donovan and Priscilla, the checks and Castle Moon Bay.”

“I’m at a loss, Miss Dyer,” Graydon said. “And I wouldn’t put much stock in where she lived that long ago.”

A knock rattled on the door. Graydon got up, opened it a crack, then let Tully Hacker come in. He was in his stocking feet, wearing a loose-fitting suede jacket, a brown hat, and carrying a pair of ornately tooled cowboy boots. At the sight of Morgan and Challis he frowned.