Free Hollywood Gothic by Thomas Gifford

your time worrying about locking doors.
    “I went up the walk, around to the side door. The sky was dark except for a blood-red line at the horizon, and the surf was maybe three feet—I remember, because it was so damned good to see and smell it all again … in my mind it was still home, where I belonged. I stood there maybe thirty seconds just watching that deep red turn to midnight blue, it moves that fast as it’s going down below the horizon, then I went in the house. I called her name a couple of times, walked down the hallway toward a glow, a lamplight, coming from the main room—it’s just a small house, you know—I can’t recall if I thought there was anything wrong, I was coming down the hall and I suppose I thought she was out on the deck or making drinks … then I came into the familiar room where I’d done so much work and, shit, here it starts to get all blurry. The whole thing traumatized me, put me in some weird shock-corridor, nightmare-alley kind of thing … there she was on the floor, lying on her side, the arm on the floor flung up above her head—I wasn’t thinking straight at all—okay, I’d had several drinks before I left my place, getting up the guts to see her again, it’s true, she still meant something to me. … Christ, you’re getting the whole gruesome story, aren’t you?”
    “I asked for it.”
    “I remember looking down at her, thinking heart attack, a fainting spell, an accident. I bent down beside her, and I was repeating her name, and then I saw my Oscar on the floor just around the corner of my desk. It had blood and her blond hair stuck to the base, and it scared me, made my skin crawl. I grabbed Goldie’s face, pulled it around, and then I saw her eyes, wide open, staring at me, dry, staring, and I got something sticky on my hand and I knew it was blood and stuff. … It was perfectly obvious that she’d been struck on the head and was now dead.
    “Then I think I heard something, some noise, a footstep, inside or outside, I didn’t know, and I grabbed the Oscar without thinking, it was the only thing close at hand resembling a weapon. My brain was climbing the walls, I felt dazed and crazy, but I know damned well what I was thinking at that point—I figured the murderer was still there, that I’d caught him in the act, and then the door came busting open and there were four cops all over me, guns drawn, and it wasn’t too terribly surprising that they voted me most likely murderer.
    “If you recall the trial, it turned out that they had been tipped off that Goldie had been murdered, that she was newly dead, and they’d gotten to the house in about twenty minutes, and there stood I with my piccolo.”
    “Your bloody piccolo,” Morgan amended, her wide mouth turning up just fractionally at the corners. Challis found this change of expression peculiarly reassuring. “Would you like a drink? Or coffee?”
    “A Scotch and soda would keep me talking,” he said. “It’s past noon.”
    “Good. I want to know what it was like inside the trial, with all the machinery whirring …”
    “Bloody boring, actually.”
    She got up, went to the sideboard, and came back with a bottle of Glenlivet, a pot of ice cubes, two heavy squat glasses, and a siphon bottle made of thick green glass with some long-ago brand name almost worn away. She poured two sturdy drinks. The soda hissed across the ice.
    “Hilary Durant was your attorney. How could that have been boring?”
    “Hilary Durant didn’t exactly bust a gut. He was civilized, he had a big fee coming from Solomon Roth, and he thought I’d simply gotten a bellyful of Goldie, gone crazy at her latest excess, and beaten her to death. So far as I could tell, I didn’t have a motive, and I figured that once they got digging into the investigation, they’d turn up somebody else, somebody with a motive and opportunity, and he’d be the killer.”
    “Circumstantial evidence is usually enough to do the trick,” Morgan