Free Hollywood Gothic by Thomas Gifford Page A

said. “I don’t know how many explanations of that I’ve read in my mysteries … failing an eyewitness or being caught red-handed, but then, you were caught more or less red-handed, weren’t you? I mean, so it obviously seemed.” She poked the embers and laid two more logs on the fire. Her blond Mary Travers hair caught the flaring flames’ reflection.
    “Well, Arnie Pryce prosecuted; figured he had me, open and shut. Murder weapon in my hand … and he and his people set about building a motive for me, which is just what I thought they wouldn’t be able to do—not a believable motive, anyway. Which is exactly where I was wrong. Obviously Pryce knew juries, knew this jury, and knew what they wanted to hear. So he went to town on the nature of my relationship with Goldie, which, God knows, was a stormy, lurid business regularly punctuated by public screaming matches, Goldie slapping and scratching me, me occasionally taking a halfhearted swing at her. Pryce painted me as eaten up by jealousy and Goldie as a nymphomaniac, screwing and carrying on with anybody who chanced by and then flaunting it in my face. And there was any army of people willing to testify to our mutual nastiness and her sluttishness … so the point was that Goldie had been a bitch and I had been driven to kill her, never mind about the call tipping off the cops, which they said was obviously someone in the Colony who had heard the last argument before I killed her … never mind that the caller said she was dead, not getting killed—all that was immaterial. Well, Durant kept pushing on the telephone call, to no avail whatsoever.” As he talked, he was recalling the bitterness he’d felt throughout the trial, watching it all go against him, watching the evidence in his favor, which seemed so crucial, so telling, continually shunted aside. He heard his voice cracking.
    Morgan said, “We can stop—”
    “So Durant said that the police had taken the Oscar and clumsily smeared my prints and anyone else’s, including possibly the murderer’s—talk about pathetic! He got better when he tried to prove that I’d have spattered myself with blood from her scalp, yet there was no blood on my clothing … he kept telling the jury that all they had to see was a reasonable doubt, but the spattered-blood routine didn’t do it, either. Then he began the not inconsiderable task of trying to whiten Goldie’s reputation—what a joke! It was all rigged, of course. Sol provided the character witnesses for us, I swear to God half the out-of-work character actors in Los Angeles swore to high heaven that they’d seen us in a hundred different settings doing the lovebird tango—I mean, these poor clucks perjured themselves as a favor to Sol Roth. Of course, the jury could barely contain its mirth at this fools’ parade. The point was, the jury wasn’t any dumber than anybody else, they didn’t believe our people, who were lying, and they did believe Pryce’s people, who were telling the truth. Then Durant called Jack Donovan to testify for us—Donovan, for Chrissakes, her boyfriend, who actually said that they were just good friends, that we were planning a reconciliation, all kinds of pure bullshit. Don’t ask me how Sol got him to do it. … Well, Donovan was a big mistake for our side. Pryce chopped him into coleslaw in cross-examination.”
    “It wasn’t much of a defense,” she said. Challis was staring into the fire. He was sweating from the memories.
    “But what else was there? I didn’t have an alibi. I was there, I was holding the fucking Oscar, she was still warm. … Her behavior really had driven me nuts—I really said the things those witnesses said they’d heard me say about her … in my fantasies I’d bludgeoned her to death a hundred times. Hell, I’d have voted to convict—”
    “Except you didn’t do it.”
    He shrugged helplessly.
    “Then somebody else did. Your only hope is to find out who did it. The system has worked