CHALLIS WAS MOVING FAST WHEN he left the back door of the Executive Building; he heard Morgan behind him, she was calling to him angrily, but he didn’t slacken the pace. She would have to keep up, she could jump ship anytime she wanted to. His heart was beating too fast, his brain turning over as he moved. The images of the day flickered before him as he filed through them, heard the voices feeding him impressions, memories, reflections: Vernon Purcell and Simon Karr and Vito Laggiardi and Herbert Graydon and Tully Hacker and Aaron Roth … Somewhere in that thicket lay the answers. But where? Where else could he go? How many sources were left? He heard Morgan but he wasn’t waiting. If she didn’t like the way he was handling the matter of his own fate, that was her business. Maybe it was a mistake, having trusted her. He was heading for the far end of the street, the little cottage in the cul-de-sac with the gingerbread bandstand in the grassy park which closed off the street. But that was crazy, Challis. Don’t turn against her, get control of yourself, she’s on your side … listen to me, Challis, the voice in his head said. He turned. “Come on, you don’t want to miss the heavy stuff.”
She was out of breath. “Bastard! Violence freak!”
“So this is love,” he said.
The old man was wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit, striped running shoes, and a powder-blue rain hat. He was getting wet, standing before the long window box where he was digging among the wintry roots and remains with an old wooden-handled trowel. He looked older than Challis had ever seen him, poking in the dirt, the black-dyed hair scraggly over the collar of the jumpsuit. He looked up briefly, smiled slightly like the sleeping crocodile. “Don’t worry, Towser,” he said, “it’s only our friend Tobias.” Towser was sheltering from the rain under the flower boxes. “I’m glad you’ve come to your sense, Tobias.” The old voice came slowly, scraping like a bow drawn across badly tuned strings.
“Sol,” Challis said, “you’re getting wet, you’ll get pneumonia.”
“Listen, Towser. Tobias is worried about me … don’t worry, I’ll be all right. Resilient old bird. I have my ups and downs, if anybody really cares … I feel a little foggy today, but there’s been so much happening with Messrs. Laggiardi—it’s all very tiring, but I’ll hold my own. I’m very glad you’re here … with … with this very brave young lady, ah, Miss …”
“Morgan Dyer,” Challis said.
“How do you do, Mr. Roth?”
“As well as can be expected, I suppose.” Suddenly his attention seemed to wander. He regarded the trowel in his hand with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, then stabbed it into the dirt. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Marty Ritt got me onto these jumpsuits, he always wears ’em, always. One of the greats, Marty Ritt … well, well, I’m glad you’ve come, yes.” He looked around, stared up the Western street. “They’ve all come down that street, Tobias. Guns blazing … Coop, Stewart, Fonda, Duke, all the greats, guns blazing.” He looked at Challis. “Well, you’re doing the right thing, I can get the machinery going right away and you can hole up right here in my little cottage … just like the movies, eh, Tobias? Yes, you’re doing the right thing.” His voice wandered off. He dropped the trowel, which hit Towser’s large, muddy foot. The huge dog gave one of his absurd tiny yelps, and Sol muttered, “Who cares who killed the rotten bitch? She’d have covered us all with her filth, her mother’s filth, just for the amusement it afforded her … my own granddaughter—ach, you’re well out of it.”
“Sol, please—”
“Now, this is your route, listen closely. You’ll go from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, then to the Canaries, then to Cairo, and finally by ship to Marseilles, two passports with a change of identity in Buenos Aires. There’ll be a villa rented for you near Cannes, you’ve got money coming from us, those deferred payments Mr. Kreisler so cleverly arranged for you … hell, Tobias, I could name a dozen men, a hundred, who would pay millions for the chance I’m offering you as a favor, as a member of the family.”
“No, Solomon, stop, for Christ’s sake! You’ve got it all wrong—I’m not going anywhere. I can’t go now, I’m too close to knowing the answers … I’m getting closer all the time, Sol, and then I won’t have to run away.” Solomon Roth looked bewildered again, his mouth working, trying to respond. Finally the crocodile jaws clamped down softly, like forgotten machinery coming to rest, with that one big incisor showing. But the eyes were alive in their red-rimmed white saucers, moving restlessly, watching. “I feel it, Sol, I’m getting close to what happened the night Goldie died. I can almost remember it sometimes, like I saw it all happen and it’s beginning to come back to me. Believe me, somebody’s going to be damn sorry when I get it clear. The thing is, Sol, it’s all tied together, everybody in the family is mixed up in it, you and me and Aaron and Kay, all of us, and it goes back a long way. Hear me out, Sol, just listen and be patient with me.”
“You’re a fool, Toby,” the old man said, his voice unexpectedly harsh and strong. Towser’s ears pricked at the derisive sound. “A stupid and silly man, bent on bringing tragedy. Forget Goldie, forget Malibu!”
“Don’t try to order me, Sol. Just listen.” Solomon Roth was poking aimlessly in the flower box. “I’m going to give you something to remember for me, a name … Morty Morpeth.” Sol made a face. “What do you remember about the Morpeth case? Was anyone else ever caught? What really happened … how did it all turn out?”
“Listen to him, Towser, time is running out, he should be thinking about Buenos Aires, and here he is babbling about that little pervert. You know, if it hadn’t been for Aaron, Morpeth’s villainy might never have been discovered. Aaron was learning the business, spending several months in each department, and he’d shown a real aptitude for accounting, cost control, keeping track of budgets. We didn’t have computers then, of course, we had people in there, accountants who kept books, honest books, not like the rest of this industry—Maximus stood for things, principles, Toby, and it still does!” He thrust his jaw forward pugnaciously, waiting to deal with any contradictions. “When I think—why, if it hadn’t been for Aaron snooping around, God only knows how much a vermin like Morpeth could have stolen, but”—he beamed triumphantly—“Aaron caught on to it … of course, by then Morpeth had bolted, he must have had the thief’s sense of being closed in on. We saw the situation, the money was gone for good, we did what we could to keep it quiet—we couldn’t let it get out that we’d been looted, confidence would have been shaken … then the man’s corpse was found and we were able to prevail on some of our friends to hush that up. We didn’t want that kind of muck clinging to Maximus, eh? Did we?”
“So none of the money was ever recovered,” Challis said. “Who killed Morpeth?”
“His foul accomplices, I presume. Who else? They took the money—”
“But the murderers were never found?”
“The man, this nobody, was dead,” he said imperiously, the slant eyes narrowing, lids slipping down like shades. “Who really cared who killed him? We were interested in our money, but it was hopeless, it wasn’t worth pursuing.”
“But you can’t keep playing God every time somebody dies!” Challis felt the anger, alive, throbbing.
“And why not, Toby?” he said soothingly. “Do you think that I don’t know what is best for Maximus? Maximus comes first. Ours is a closed society, that’s always been my view … people come and go, even I will be gone someday … even I, but this industry is much like a nation within our great country, and our nation is divided into our own states, duchies, principalities—the great studios—”
“You should hear yourself,” Challis said. “You really should.”
“Now, now, you’re getting all worked up over something that doesn’t concern you. Come on, let’s go sit in the bandstand.” He took Challis by the arm, Towser following, and led the way to the white bandstand with the naked trellises and blistered, scabrous paint. Morgan with her long strides got there first. The rain tapped on the wooden roof.
“Sol, it was your damned closed society that decided I could take the fall for Goldie’s murder, nothing personal Toby-old-chum-old-kid, but it’s awfully convenient to stick you in the bin for this one—shit!” He slammed the side of his fist against a white pillar. The whole edifice shook.
“Toby …” Morgan whispered.
“And now we’re taking you out of the bin and giving you back your life in a very nice wrapping … who can say, maybe better than it was before. My advice, take the new life …”
Challis leaned on the wooden pillar, stared up the desolate street, shook his head. He brushed Morgan’s hand away.
“Sol,” he said, “I can’t even tell if you’re all there anymore. I mean, you just rattle this stuff off like a grocery list, and you’re crazy. Anywhere else in the world, they’d put you away.”
“But we’re here,” he said. He smiled.
“You’re one of a kind. You’re crazy and arrogant and moralistic, you’re an old bastard. You’ve been playing with my life as if it just didn’t matter what happened.”
Solomon Roth smiled, nodded, as if to reassure the man who was yelling at him. Indulgent.
“Okay, now it’s your turn, old man. I’m gonna lay some very nasty facts on you, and we’ll see how well you can take it.”
“Please, Toby …” he said. He sat down on a freestanding porch swing that some anonymous property man thought went well with the bandstand, the village square, the tall elms and maples that cast shade on sunny days.
“You remember the diaries you never saw but paid a million dollars to suppress?”
“Of course.”
“Well, see if you can play God with this. It was all a put-up job, Sol. Aaron got you to pay the million to save his own ass, not the studio’s, not Kay’s, but his own. Oh, the diaries could have soaked Maximus with plenty of dirt, that was true enough, but not for the reason you were told. Aaron was the villain of the diaries. Oh, Christ, was he!”
Solomon Roth’s recovery began to dissipate at once. His hand groped for the armrest and his eyes began to float and jerk, from Challis to Morgan. He looked like a man who had deep in his heart expected the worst, and on hearing it, found it even worse than he’d feared.
“This bandstand,” Sol said. “This pretty little bandstand, all white with bunting on the railing … forty-some years ago, Kay wore a gingham dress, little puffy sleeves … she got the townspeople together to celebrate the Fourth of July even though it was the Depression and the banker was a mean old man … do you remember that picture, Miss Dyer? Your father was the cameraman on that picture … hmmmm, yes, and the banker turned out to have a heart of gold … he didn’t foreclose on Kay’s father, the lumberyard, and he played the tuba in the town band and Kay led the parade down this street to the bandstand for the finale … it was a better world … back then, a better place.”
“I’ve got the diaries, Sol,” Challis said. “I’ve got them.”
“What? I don’t understand.” The old man covered his eyes with a wrinkled hand. “Oh, no, Toby. You …”
“I got them from Donovan’s boat last night.”
“You’ve killed again? Oh, no … oh, no.”
“We didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Roth,” Morgan said. Thunder rasped above the mountains. It was raining harder. “I was there, too, Jack was already dead.”
“Listen to me, Sol. The diaries, Kay’s diaries, they told the truth about Aaron … the kind of man Aaron is, what he did to Kay, driving her to booze and dope and stealing from her … Listen, dammit, it’s my life at stake, Aaron couldn’t let the diaries come out, he couldn’t let you know what kind of man he was and is. Who killed Goldie, Sol? Is Aaron a murderer? Did he kill his daughter? Or did Donovan have to do it for him? She knew all about her father, she’d always know what a rotten bastard he was, that’s why she always hated him. And when she found the diaries, she knew she had him at last. But she made the mistake of going to an unscrupulous opportunist like Donovan, who had his own uses for them, and then, once he had his million from you two suckers, somebody had to make sure Goldie didn’t start talking. So who killed her, who should have been tried and convicted? Donovan or Aaron?”
Solomon Roth stared off into the slanting gray rain; his fingertips drummed erratically on the arm of the swing. Slowly, the old chain couplings creaking eerily in the stillness, he swung to and fro. Finally he got unsteadily to his feet, turned slowly toward the steps.
Challis said, “And where does Morpeth fit in? Somebody must know, somebody … and it’ll fit, I’ll make it fit if I have the time, it’s part of the whole thing. Morpeth, Goldie, Donovan, and Maximus …” The old man was carefully descending the steps one at a time. “Maximus is going to get dirty now, Sol … you can walk away from me, but I’ve got the diaries.”
Sol was several feet from the bottom step, moving toward his cottage. The rain was blowing, and water dripped from his face.
“You know how rotten Aaron really is, Sol? He paid a debt by putting Kay into Vito Laggiardi’s bed. Sol, your whole bloody corrupt world is coming apart … why not help me? You know something, you know, you must know.”
He turned to face Challis. He was standing on the wet grass.
“I do know, Toby.” His face seemed ineffably sad. “I know who killed Goldie … you can’t hurt me, Toby. You can’t hurt me anymore because I understand all of you, all of you.” He walked haltingly on toward the cottage, his voice trailing away. “You and Aaron and Goldie and Donovan and Kay, and … and …”
He reached the cottage and the door swung open. Towser looked up attentively.
Tully Hacker stood in the doorway, watching.