THE 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.”
Aaron Roth kept his mouth tightly shut while Toby told Solomon Roth the story of the past few days, beginning with the plane crash. His eyes flickered behind his spectacles. He was thinking. His fingertips tapped on the edge of the tub.
Solomon Roth sat staring at Toby when the story was over. Finally he shook his head, stroked Towser’s jowls. “Never heard such a story, never! What a picture it would make. Thank God you’re alive, thank him for what a man must never expect—a second chance. But now, what is your plan? Indeed, do you have a plan?” He pulled the robe closer around his neck, where a tuft of gray hair showed on his chest.
“Just what I said, Sol. I want to find out what Goldie was doing at the end … with Donovan. I just can’t see heading off into the bush without ever knowing what was going on. And don’t tell me I’m being stupid, don’t ask me who cares, what difference does any of it make—”
“You know me better than that, Toby. You know I am the man who will understand your situation.” He fit another cigarette into the holder and did the match trick again. “Who knows you’re alive and well?” Toby told him, and Roth’s eyebrows pulled together, the long eyes narrowing. “That seems like a lot of people … the more people who know—well, you see my point. What about the clown people, Aaron? Do they know?”
“Certainly not,” Aaron said without looking at his father. “Do you think I just introduced them all?”
“Aaron, if those crazy people are invited here again, I’ll have Mr. Hacker and Towser here run them out of town. Do you understand me?”
“Isn’t that a little harsh, Father? All they preach is happiness.”
“There is no room for charlatan’s fakery and japery and what-not here. They give our community and our work a bad name.”
“I won’t ask them here again, Father. It was my mistake—”
“You should develop a hobby, Aaron.” The old man had developed a tendency to cling to an idea, to keep refining it until it had been reduced to a nameless silt and everybody else was climbing the walls. “You should develop a hobby like my Stainforths … the paintings of horses are more expensive than maintaining a stable, perhaps, but the upkeep is so much less—Toby, there you are! Forgive me, late at night my mind sometimes wanders, I forget what I should be attending to—now, why is it you’re here? What exactly is going on?” Towser unexpectedly let out a yelp and Aaron threw the shark at him. Towser gave him a hurt look and pulled the shark’s head off, spit it out.
“I came here to pick on Aaron … about Donovan and Laggiardi. I was doing a pretty damned good job of it, too.” Toby smiled at the old man. The mist was lowering upon them. Los Angeles was only a faint yellow blur of light behind the fog. There were no sounds anymore. It was always strange, listening to Sol flicker in and out of a conversation.
“You know, I’ve never thought you killed my granddaughter,” Sol said. “You’re aware of that …” For a moment he was conducting a conversation all his own.
Toby went on. “I asked Aaron what the hell Goldie was doing to him. I ran into a stone wall … your son won’t be candid with me, Sol. So what can I do?”
“I’ve never thought you were guilty. It was a circumstantial case … I got you the very best lawyers I could find. You must believe that.”
“I know that, Sol, and I appreciate it. But it didn’t do me any good in the end, so here I am. I’ve got to dig it all out myself, and the digging isn’t easy. My guess is that Goldie was blackmailing poor Aaron here … real hard-edged blackmail could drive anybody to the clowns.”
“For God’s sake, Toby,” Aaron said softly, almost imploring him, “shut it off, you’re on the wrong track entirely.”
“What do you say, Sol? Am I on the wrong track? Aaron says you’ve just taken to investing in magazines as a hardheaded business venture. With a little shared grief thrown in … and I say that particular piece of hamburger has been in the sun too long, smells like shit.”
Solomon Roth held up his big soft hand, his mouth set in the crocodile grin. It was an involuntary configuration, the way his mouth worked. It didn’t mean he saw anything funny in the situation. “Please, please,” he said. “Much too graphic, but as usual, you’re very close to the bone, very acute. You’re a sly one, clever. … Aaron, I think you owe our Tobias an apology. I think we’d better tell Tobias the truth.”
“No apology from me,” Aaron said. His shark was in ribbons.
Solomon Roth stared at Toby.
“What did she have on him, Sol? It comes down to that.” It crossed Challis’ mind at just that instant: have I gone too far? Do I really want to know? But the questions were gone as quickly as they’d come.
Aaron said, “You amaze me, Toby. You really amaze me.”
Solomon Roth said, “Be still! We’re talking to a member of the family now. We owe him the truth … then we can see what comes next.”
“I won’t be a party to this,” Aaron said. He hoisted himself up out of the steaming water, looking frail in the dim light, the black hair matted on his white body. He grabbed a robe and crawled quickly inside its folds. “Tell him whatever you like … I’m tempted to call the cops. No, no, I won’t.” He was polishing his glasses on the robe’s belt. “But you’re making a mistake. That’s my opinion, and I will stick to it. Good-bye, Toby. You’re on your own, as far as I’m concerned.” His voice was shaking. He clutched his robe, and struck off into the fog.
Challis said, “The truth …” A wave of tiredness swept across him. “I wouldn’t recognize the truth if I found it in my underpants.” He sighed.
Solomon Roth laughed, his lower jaw jutting out beyond the upper, and a big jagged incisor drooping over his lip.
“The truth is frequently a letdown, Toby. But it’s always better to stick to it. It keeps thing simple. You must be selfless to cope with it, though. Suppress the ego. Which is why truth is such a rare commodity in our business. Too much ego, and the truth can always be shaped to our ends.”
“So what is the truth, Sol? What did Goldie have on Aaron? How did Donovan get into it?”
“You amaze me with your reluctance to ask the one logical question—and you a writer!” His eyes were the narrowest of slits, as if he were peering out from inside a cage. “You should keep asking about the identity of the murderer. You’re trying to clear yourself, am I right? Then act the part, Toby, or people will think you already know.”
“Sometimes I think I do know,” Challis said softly.
“The killer?”
“Yes, I think I know it, the name, but then it’s not there. I feel like I actually saw him, saw it happen. … I don’t know how to explain it, but maybe it frightened me, maybe I don’t want to accept the identity of the murderer—maybe I’m just punchy, who knows?” He stared at the flat surface of turquoise water, glowing. “I heard a noise that night. I see Goldie lying there, and I hear a noise outside … someone watching me as I stand there holding the bloody Oscar. I get that far, and my memory gets wiped away—fear, I suppose, I remember I was dripping with cold sweat when the cops got there. I dream about it, and the same thing happens, I get just so far, knowing there’s somebody outside watching me, then I wake up shaking and wet.” He shrugged, turned back to Sol. “Who the hell was outside watching me? Maybe I actually saw him and can’t handle the knowledge. Anyway, I can’t seem to force it.” He shook his head, getting straight again. “So what’s the story about Goldie and Aaron?”
“It’s a cheap story,” Solomon Roth said. “You’ll see why it couldn’t come out at the trial. There was no way it could have affected the trial, anyway.” He rubbed his pulpy white foot along Towser’s spine, and the dog yawned. There was a piece of shark stuck between two long, sharp teeth. “It all comes down to the unhappy part women have played in Aaron’s life, first Kay, then Goldie. Digging into the psychopathology of their lives is hardly my place. Aaron is the one with the education in the family, but for all his education, he came into Maximus a complete innocent, fresh-faced idealist, eager to learn, willing to work his way up. But for all his willingness and determination, he had a terrible blind spot. Women … can you believe, little Aaron was a virgin when he left New Haven and came home to go to work! And here he was, Solomon Roth’s son, surrounded by some of the most beautiful, alluring women in the world, women who saw him not simply as a young man trying to make his way in an incredibly complex and sophisticated business, but as my son … a quick ticket to the top. Not exactly a new story … no, not exactly.”
“The last tycoon,” Challis muttered. “What has this got to do with—”
“Kay Flanders was a star at this point, twenty years old in 1941. She’d been a star for Maximus since she was, what? Fourteen? Her first big picture was that Civil War musical … 1935, it was. She too big too young. An unspoiled girl at fourteen when I saw the potential in her …” The old man drifted for a moment in a reverie of swaying magnolias and smiling black folks on the old plantation and cotton fields and dashing fellows with mustaches and gray uniforms with braid. And the little girl with long soft curls and puffy sleeves and the bell of a voice and the sloe eyes with the heavy dark fringe of lashes. “She grew up fast. She was sexually mature very early, and I’ll go to my grave believing that Terry Downes—sixty if he was a day—who directed her in that first big one, was her first man. I’m positive, but I could never prove it, it’s neither here nor there, I suppose. But she liked it … you know, Toby, the way some women really like it? It’s fun, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just fun?”
“You mean Kay looked at sex the same way as the men she was screwing? Sure, I get the idea.”
“Terry when she was fourteen, Tony Ashton at fifteen, Cedric Darwin at sixteen, Paul Irving at seventeen, Lydia Duncan—yes, a woman, a great star, Lydia Duncan—at eighteen, and Lydia’s husband, Sylvester, too, he was a cameraman … Kay was rapacious, but she was so beautiful, so angelic, so fetching—and I didn’t know what she was up to then. No, no, it all came to my attention later on, what sort of creature she was. But in 1941 she was still Maximus’ top star and I believed our own publicity on her … blame me if you wish, I was as innocent as poor Aaron, I didn’t know there were women like Kay Flanders—was I naive? Hell yes. Oh, yes, I knew there were such women, yes, but not in my family—that’s the way I looked at Maximus … my family. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for that family, everybody knows that, but I felt I could trust them all. I did trust them all. And when Aaron graduated from Yale in 1939 and came home, he met Kay … and it came on slowly, slowly, but it seemed like such a sweet thing to me. My son and Kay Flanders, falling in love … it was a wonderful movie, Toby, it really was. They were married in 1941. There were a thousand people at the reception, everybody in our world who mattered, who made the industry a great force in the world … they were celebrating the marriage of my son and America’s sweetheart. The happiest day of my life? I think so. Maybe the last time I knew such happiness.” He shivered like a man discovering leeches sucking at his belly. “How many of my guests knew the truth? How many were drinking my Veuve Clicquot and Mumm’s and looking at me and Aaron and snickering? How many, Toby? How many were saying Aaron Roth had just married the easiest fuck in the business? Terry, Tony, Cedric, the Duncans—hell, they were all there at the reception. And I was smiling and Aaron was adoring her and we danced with the bride … well, that’s when it all began, Toby—1941, about six weeks before Pearl Harbor.”
“How did you ever find out the truth about her?”
“Aaron came to me, admitted it … but by then I knew they were not happy. I knew there was something wrong and Aaron had to tell me about the drugs and the drinking first, had to because I was continually seeing evidence with my own eyes. I’m not a fool, whatever else may be said about me—naive, innocent, unobservant, trusting. But not a stupid man.” The crocodile’s grin was still there, masking the old man’s feelings. “Aaron went into the service, the Navy, first in the Pacific, then in Washington as a liaison with Hollywood, and in 1942 while he was on a battleship, Goldie was born. America was happy for us. Daddy fighting the war, Mommy still making movies and having time to bear a beautiful blond daughter—Goldie was on the cover of Life, but you know that of course. Little Goldie, eight weeks old, smiling up at her mother. The picture went all over the world. … The pride I felt! They had an interview with Aaron and a picture of him taken somewhere with Admiral Halsey. … God, what days they were!”
“So when did it all begin to go wrong?”
“Aaron came back to us in 1945 and Kay made two more big musicals in 1946 and 1948 and was spending time being a mother. But there was something wrong with Aaron—he was thirty, he’d come out of the war in fine shape, he was taking hold nicely at the studio, he had a beautiful daughter, his wife was a great star … you’d think, here’s a man who has it all.”
“That’s what I’d think, all right,” Toby said.
“But Aaron was a badly troubled man. He wouldn’t talk to me about his problems, he was distant, terribly nervous, he wouldn’t seek help or comfort from anyone. Well, it was years before I knew what was going on … but it was all to do with Kay. She’d begun to drink heavily, at home, on the sly. She didn’t make a picture for … what, five years … 1953. And it was a comedy she seemed to walk through, no spirit, no verve, and the rumors began. Tantrums on the set, firing secretaries and hairdressers and stand-ins, but everybody at Maximus was trying to shield me, they knew how I worshiped her and Goldie, who was eleven by then. No one wanted me to know the truth, but when the 1953 picture came out it was such a flop, well, things began to come to a head. Aaron finally told me what was going on. And it was a nightmare story—drugs, drinking, abuse of Aaron and Goldie … and he told me how she’d disappear for days at a time, and he hired private detectives to find her … the head of publicity at Maximus had his hands full half of the time keeping it all quiet. And he kept it quiet, all right—I didn’t even know, and I was involved in everything at the studio in those days. Everything.
“We did all we could to get Kay back on the track. It was distasteful to me, but what could I do? Throw her to the wolves? She’d have been ripped to pieces … and I believed there was still hope for her. My God, Toby, she was only thirty-three, thirty-four years old. We put her in a very private clinic in Switzerland, got the dope and the liquor out of her system, but …” The old man swallowed hard, as if the memories and the effort of talking such a long time were working on him. “But she’d had hard usage, Toby. She was getting old long before her time, she had the shakes, and there was nothing she could do about them. She was terrified of a thousand little things … people, crowds, being seen, having to talk, any kind of noise, even Goldie—she didn’t want to see her own daughter, or be seen by her. She lost a lot of hair, got gray, lost weight, couldn’t remember things, she’d wander around the grounds of the sanatorium in Switzerland quite naked, like some pathetic survivor of a death camp. It was tragic. But at least no one knew about it, we kept it all in the family. Aaron was a monk, worked like a madman, was always flying to Paris and then going to see her incognito … a couple of times a year they’d go out, to a premiere in London or to Cannes or visiting dear friends at Cap Ferrat or in New York. The world would see her and she’d look fine. But it was all camouflage. Then back to Switzerland. Slowly she seemed to improve. Seven years went by, and in 1960 she was determined to make a comeback … but not a picture. She wanted to do a concert. She worked hard, her voice was different now, ragged and strange, but she worked hard, she saw to every part of the show, and she did it at the Olympia in Paris. Well, it made history, as you know. She was utterly different from America’s sweetheart, she wasn’t yet forty, but she looked fifty, frail, used, and the French went crazy. She played two weeks and she didn’t come apart, she held up. Aaron was so happy. Arrangements were made for her to play the Palace in New York, Aaron set the whole thing up—he was a man possessed. And the show at the Palace was a triumph … people still buy the recording today. But it was then that Aaron discovered how she was holding herself together—more drugs, new drugs, and an endless succession of men. Preying on her. … At one time I feared for Aaron’s sanity. I thought he might kill himself. But he’s strong. What was he to do? Commit her to another sanatorium? Send her back to Switzerland? She was famous again, maybe bigger than she’d ever been before … there was no tasteful way to get her out of the spotlight, not anymore. So he let it go on, tried to keep up appearances, covered for her in every way he could … and in 1967 you married Goldie, so you know what she was like at the end. Barely human, barely alive, totally dependent on drugs. You saw her, Toby, you saw what was left of Kay Roth by the time you met her in 1966, 1967. And then, when she went back to Paris to play the Olympia again, she died … she killed herself, of course, one way or another. Too much pills and liquor, the wrong man, and that was it. The French loved it, a grand finale.” Solomon Roth got another cigarette into his holder after several tries: his hands wouldn’t work quite right. He did the match thing, flung the match into the hot tub.
It wasn’t quite the story Challis had expected, but Solomon surely knew the truth. To Challis, Kay had seemed frail, unwell, but composed, friendly, little seen.
“I still don’t get it,” Toby said. “What has it got to do with Goldie ten years later?”
“Oh,” Solomon Roth said. “The diary … Kay had kept a diary. Meticulously detailed. No matter how terrible her condition, she kept a diary. Everything was in the diary, all the men, all the drugs she tried, all the sewer stuff scraped out of her diseased mind. You see, nobody knew she’d kept this detailed record, nobody at all … until Goldie …
“When Kay died in Paris, she had trunks of stuff with her. It was eventually all shipped back here, and we just stored it, no one ever opened the trunks, until Goldie did a year, eighteen months ago, and she didn’t even tell anybody she was going to do it. But she’d become very interested in Kay’s life in recent years—maybe it had struck her that she was just about the age when her mother went round the bend. I don’t know. What matters is that she got into the trunks and found the diary … diaries, I suppose, to be accurate. And it was all there, the whole story.” He puffed smoke before him, pushed his hand slowly through it.
“Jesus,” Challis said. “I was right, then. Blackmail.”
“Goldie hated her father that much,” Roth said sadly, each word pulled forth at the cost of considerable psychic agony. “She had met Jack Donovan, and in her mind she made the connection, Donovan and the diaries. He had a magazine, he knew the publishing business. I doubt if she even thought of the kind of killing she could make through the book rights, the paperback rights, world rights. What she wanted was to get back at her father, at all of us I suppose, but mainly at Aaron. She knew she finally had him.” His old face sagged like his body somewhere deep inside the robe, but the grin remained.
“My God,” Challis breathed softly. “Aaron had a hell of a motive for—”
“Don’t even think it, Toby. In the first place, killing Goldie wouldn’t have done any good. Donovan was already in on it … and he’s alive, don’t you see? No, Goldie had no interest in blackmail, none whatsoever. She wanted the diaries published. She wanted Donovan to run them in his magazine. In installments. She saw it as a circulation builder for Donovan and revenge on Aaron for herself.
“It was Jack Donovan who saw the blackmail potential. He came to us and told us that Goldie had offered the diaries to him, free and clear, for the purpose of running them in his magazine. Mr. Donovan just let that hang there between him and Aaron … then he told Aaron what was in the diaries. Aaron was suddenly faced with the whole cesspool, just dumped in his lap. Well, he had no choice but to come to me for guidance. What to do? By coming to us, Donovan had signaled that there was a way out of our dilemma. After all, he hadn’t just gone off to the printer and let us simply read it all in the magazine. He came to us … and Aaron. And let Aaron know that he needed a million dollars to prop up the magazine, to get it where he wanted it. He wasn’t asking for a gift. He was asking for an investment of one million dollars. Aaron couldn’t do that by himself, he had to come to me. It didn’t take me long to say yes. The man had us by the short hairs … he told us he had the diaries, we gave him the money on his assurance that he could control Goldie. It was indescribably sloppy on our part, we were panic-stricken, we had to stop publication.”
“And the diaries?” Challis asked.
“I leave that to Aaron—”
“You mean to tell me you don’t know?”
“I don’t know. I’m an old man, I’ve tried not to think about it.” Towser looked up, sniffed the wet night air. “It was pay up or Kay’s filth would go out to the world … can you imagine that? Kay Roth?” He shuddered. “So I don’t think Aaron did anything to Goldie, and I don’t think her death was involved in any way with all this—”
“Solomon, you’re crazy.”
“And why is that?”
“What if Donovan didn’t have the diaries? What if he’d only read them? And he finds a couple of quaking imbeciles who’ll fork over a million bucks for nothing but his assurances. But then Goldie gets fed up with Donovan’s stalling around and not publishing them, she gets pissed off and says she’s going to someone else. But Donovan’s got the million she doesn’t know about, and he keeps seeing Tully Hacker pulling his head off and spitting in the hole—you get the picture? And Aaron and you might be angry over a million dollars just thrown away … Goldie won’t listen to reason. So Jack beats her to death just before I wander in looking for my dinner! Christ, and you sit here telling me there was no point in bringing it up at the trial?”
“Now, now, Toby. Bringing it up at the trial would have wasted our million, too. And Goldie would have had her revenge. From the grave. No, we couldn’t allow that, I’m afraid.”
“Sol, I don’t know what to say. I guess good night will have to do.” Challis stood up, watched Towser prick his ears and growl.
“Good night, Toby.” Challis was walking away. “Come see me tomorrow, Toby. We’ll get you out of this.” His voice faded away in the fog.