Hollywood Gothic (37 page)

“What about the bodies?” Morgan asked practically.

“The police know these guys. No big-deal investigation. Don’t worry. All we’re doing is teaching Mr. Laggiardi a lesson about bringing New York muscle in here. But now you’ve got to pay me back—I think we’ll all sleep a lot easier if you’d give me the diaries. I don’t even want to read them. I just want to put a match to them.” He looked over at Challis and waited.

“They’re safe,” Challis said. “They’re hidden in a little toolshed at the back of Morgan’s yard. Nobody’s going to find them.”

“That’s good,” Tully said. “Very good.”

“Laggiardi’s going to have a fit.”

“Correction,” Tully said with a faint smile in his voice. “He’s going to be very glad I don’t run him out of town on a meat hook in a refrigerated truck. Relax, Toby … what happens now?”

“Aaron’s running around loose,” Morgan said. “And—”

“And we’re going to Griffith Park to meet Priscilla Morpeth. Aaron doesn’t know where she is.”

Tully Hacker nodded. “Okay. You two take the Mustang. If you don’t mind, I’ll follow you. I’d kind of like to sit in on that conversation. I’ve been involved there for a long time, and y’know, I never did get it all figured out. No, I never did. It’s about time I did. Would you mind?”

“No,” Challis said. “We wouldn’t mind.”

“Why did Laggiardi send these men?” Morgan asked, systematically wanting it clear. “What was the point?”

“Nerves, I’d say,” Tully mused, staring out at the rain slashing across the beach. “He doesn’t feel at home out here, he’s got the jitters, he doesn’t know who he can trust and who he can’t … he’s trying to clear up loose ends, reduce the margin for error—so he must have decided you two know way too much, and there was one way to get you off his mind.”

“What’s to keep him from going into Ollie Kreisler’s mail room—I told him I’d sent the diaries to Ollie—and shooting people until he gets them?”

“In the first place, he’s just run out of shooters. In the second place, when I tell him I’ve got them, he’ll go light a candle somewhere and brush up on his manners. Now, let’s get going, Toby.”

Morgan was running through the rain toward the Mustang when Challis leaned back into the station wagon.

“You made it back to the bridge, Tully.”

“I guess I did. It’s no place for an old man with a bad leg, though. Wind and rain and no damn time to spare … I just wanted it to sound easy for the lady.”

“Your John Wayne image.”

Tully Hacker just smiled. He took his hands off the wheel. They were shaking still.

The Griffith Park Observatory sat out on its promontory like a mysterious pagan temple, the prototype for all the Southern California loonies who pitched their tents on mountaintops and made plans for the Second Coming, who herded their disciples inside, ate pine nuts and roots and berries, and worshiped the sun and flying things, who wore razor-sharp talons on leather thongs around their necks. The rain had calmed to a mist, but the wind was blowing hard as they parked the cars and walked past the beaten-up old yellow Toyota. Behind them Challis glimpsed the ruin of the
HOLLYWOOD
sign looking like an archaeological find. Water stood in puddles on the path. It was all so familiar: a place he’d loved to come to, the towering statues of Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler … he remembered the names without looking … and the sundial you could set your watch by in sunny weather. Ahead of them was the building itself, white in the pale glow of the lamps with the three green domes in which the telescopes stood.

As they climbed the steps which clung to the edge of the building and seemed in fact to be hanging perilously from a cliff facing, he was struck by the silence of it all. The lights of Los Angeles glimmered far below, beyond the veil of mist and fog. A dog barked far away and the sound rode briefly on the wind.

She stood at the white edge of the turret, looking out at the city, the wind snapping at the cape and hood which made her shapeless, massive. She was leaning slightly into the wind, like a sentry on the castle’s battlements, watching the night. She could not possibly have seen them approaching, but she turned, whirled dramatically, and spoke in a shrill voice as Challis approached.

“You,” she cried, “you are not well … there is death, you bring death with you … are you ill?” Her face was in shadow, hidden by the cape’s hood. She moved forward, and the yellow light of the lamps reflecting on the white building caught her face.

Challis had seen her before.

The jangling woman in Jack Donovan’s office. She had come to warn Donovan, and he had brushed her aside, hadn’t had time for her just then. She had called the receptionist Marguerite, hadn’t she? Something like that … Challis had been that close to her, had watched her, and she was Priscilla Morpeth. …

“Mrs. Morpeth,” he said. Tully was breathing hard, clumping along on his bad leg, and Morgan was beside him, holding on to his arm.

“You know me?” She cocked her head and the wind picked at the hood. He caught a glimpse of the pointed nose, the bright red mouth that clashed with the coppery, henna-rinsed coils of hair. There was a glint of madness in the shining iris, but kindness, too, a crafty, sly kindness.

“I saw you in Jack Donovan’s office,” Challis said.

“Poor Jack,” she said, exaggerating the sorrow in her voice, drawing the two words out to an absurd length. Then she cocked her head again, smiled crookedly. “I was right to be worried, wasn’t I? There was no doubt in my mind … I am always right, invariably … who are you, young man?”

Tully Hacker stepped forward. “Mrs. Morpeth, do you remember me?”

She peered forward, her head and neck thrusting at them.

“Why, it’s you,” she said. “Hooker, was it? Something like that—I’m bad with names, but faces are something else. You were very kind to me at the time of my husband’s death, I’d know you anywhere, though you’ve gotten older. …”

“Hacker, ma’am.”

“Of course. But what are you doing here, might I ask?” She seemed to be enjoying herself, as if weird encounters in the night were the rule.

“We’ve been looking for you,” Hacker said. “It’s a helluva long story … but it has to do with …” He stopped and looked at Challis, then at Morgan.

Morgan said, “Herbert Graydon told us you might be able to help us … we need to know about your relationship with Kay Roth, then her daughter, Goldie, and it really is a matter of life and death.” She looked at Toby, said, “This man’s life depends on what you have to tell us … or, it
may
.”

“Death is all around him. Believe me … I have the power to know these things, ignore me at your peril.” She flashed the cockeyed grin again and brushed windblown red and gray hair away from her face. Rings, gold and bright stones, flashed; bracelets clattered up her sleeve.

“You’re quite right,” Challis said. “If I put some rather blunt, impertinent questions to you, would you give us the benefit of the doubt and try to answer them?”

“You want to know about Morty, don’t you?” She sighed dramatically, looked away from them toward the emptiness and darkness which lay between them and the city. “For thirty years I’ve been waiting for you to come, to ask about poor Morty. And now you’re here at last.” She looked back at Hacker. “You were kind, yes, but you didn’t want to know the truth, did you? Admit it!”

“That’s right, ma’am,” he said. “We just wanted everything to get back to normal … your husband shouldn’t have stolen that money. And what happened to him, well … he knew the chances he was taking.”

“But why,” Challis said, “why were you blackmailing Kay and Goldie?”

She cackled furiously, shaking her head. “Now, there you are, jumping to conclusions, just like the people who think I come up here to look at the stars, which isn’t the case at all. I don’t have to
look
at the stars—they move by immutable laws, I know where they are without looking … I come here to
commune.
But they must jump to their conclusions, that’s always the case. They jumped to all sorts of conclusions about Morty, and they were wrong. Now you jump to conclusions about me.”

“We have the canceled checks,” Morgan said quietly. Her face was damp with mist. She towered over Priscilla Morpeth. She seemed to be getting taller, Challis thought, unless he was shrinking.

“And why do you leap to the conclusion that I was blackmailing them? They paid me for services rendered, I did their astrological charts, gave them advice … I
do
that, it’s what I
do …
Mrs. Roth and her daughter were both very kind to me, they let me do their charts when I’d fallen on bad times. Morty’s money ran out, I had to live, so I went to Mrs. Roth and told her everything … my, my, it certainly wasn’t blackmail … she was a kind, decent woman, she heard my story, she did her duty, plain and simple.” She sniffed and shook her head. “Blackmail! The idea!”

“But what about Goldie?” Challis said. “She didn’t give a damn about astrology.” He remembered the charts, how she’d always thrown them in a drawer unopened.

“When Mrs. Roth died, her daughter saw her obligation to me … she acted honorably. And I did what I was paid to do. Look at the checks, you call that blackmail? That money meant nothing to them—and the world to me. I told Goldie the truth, the whole truth.” She took a few steps along the battlement. “She knew I had to live, and she felt an obligation—she was a decent person … but she died, too. Everybody who knew the truth about Morty seems to have died, everyone but Aaron Roth … and me. Mr. Donovan knew, and he’s dead. The Roth women knew, they’re dead … I used to worry about what might happen to me, but now it’s been thirty years. … I’ve kept the letter, though. I never knew when I might need it … it’s at Wells Fargo in my safe-deposit box.”

“What letter?” Morgan asked.

Priscilla Morpeth gave her a gimlet eye, a crafty smile. “Why, the letter that tells the whole story. … Morty knew that he was in danger, that he might not come out of it alive, so he wrote a long letter that explained exactly what he was doing and why. … He gave the letter to Herbert Graydon, told Herbert that it was personal, husband and wife, and that Herbert should give it to me if anything happened to him. So when Morty’s body was found, Herbert gave me the letter … and I knew I couldn’t do anything with it. It was no good to me … it wasn’t what anyone here would have wanted to hear … you heard Mr. Hacker, his job was to keep everything calm, not stir things up.”

“The story,” Challis prodded. “What was in the letter?”

“Oh, you won’t believe it either,” she said. “I know that, and I don’t even know who you are—”

“Please,” he said. “Please tell us.”

She made no move to leave the parapet, leaning into its embrace. Her eyes darted about, not crazily, but from an almost boundless sense of energy.

“It all began when Morty and I came here after the war,” she said, eyes alternately half-closed, summoning up the memory, and large, round, bulging as she watched for reactions. “He had met some movie actors in Cairo and Alexandria and Paris during the war, they’d hit it off, and it wasn’t just that he’d worked for Korda and knew about the business … it was the kind of fellow he was. He was a jolly good hero in the flesh, the kind of fellow the actors had only played on the screen, and they admired him, told him he’d have to find his way to Hollywood once the war was over … they’d vouch for him. So, we came here and they saw he got to meet people, and one of the people he met was Aaron Roth, and they got on famously with their war stories and what-not … Morty told me he thought Aaron was a little sweet on him, a crush, but nothing ever happened between them, of course, but Morty was used to the attention—pansies were always making eyes at Morty because he was such a dashing fellow, and handsome in a very English way, thin little mustache …” She cocked her head and abruptly remarked, “Seems strange to be talking about him now, remembering him so clearly—he’s been on the other side for thirty years and I haven’t spoken with him for, oh, my, ten years I expect, it was about ten years ago he began to fade away, he told me that he was all right, that he had faith in my ability to go on with the rest of my life, that he’d keep watch over me … and he’d be waiting for me when my time came to cross over.” She was almost whispering, as if she’d forgotten their presence, but then the white globe of an eye flew open and stared at them from the shadows of her hood, and she was back.

“Anyway, Aaron hired him at Maximus and set him to work in the accounting end of things. Aaron put him on the budgeting for certain pictures, and just the two of them had access to those books. They’d go over the books every night, moving figures here and there and back again, cost-accounting, analyzing, and they’d go out for drinks in the evening after work … then Aaron popped the question! Could Morty use a little extra money? Because Aaron knew how to make some. Well, you had to know Morty—he was always looking for the easy chance, the angle, he’d positively come alive at the chance to work a fiddle on the side, funny money was always better value, he’d say, than honest money, money you had to sweat for … well, Aaron really went at it with a spade and a trowel, laying it on, confiding, telling Morty how he needed some money himself and how he was scared to ask his father and his father would never give it to him anyway. What it boiled down to was, Aaron needed a lot of money to pay off New York gambling debts, betting on basketball games. There was an Italian, Vitorrio Laggiardi, and Aaron owed him something like half a million dollars. Aaron told Morty that he’d taken as much as he could from his wife’s accounts, that he was half a million short. He said he’d cut Morty in for twenty-five thousand dollars for a few evenings’ work on the books. Well, Morty wouldn’t hesitate a moment on a fiddle like that, that was his specialty, and what could be safer than having the boss’s son in it with him, and behind the whole thing, too? Well, Morty did it, cooked the books in the finest old Hollywood tradition, got Aaron his half-million and his own twenty-five thousand in about three months. But Morty took one precaution, he left the letter with Herbert Graydon. Because he knew there was a chance things could go wrong, Murphy’s Law … and sure enough, things went wrong in the very worst way, because Aaron Roth wasn’t quite the coward Morty had him figured out to be. Aaron killed Morty.” She flashed the huge eyes at them, gave them the gaga smile, watched their faces absorb the story.