Free Hollywood Gothic by Thomas Gifford Page B

its way with you, found you guilty of murder, and now by a whacko quirk of fate, you’re loose. You can’t go to anyone, because the case is closed, you’re a fugitive, and anyone who helps you is in big trouble. … Is that accurate, Soldier? And if you give yourself up, the case stays closed, you go to prison, and there’s nobody out here to do anything about it. So, hadn’t you better do it yourself? So what have you got to lose?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. He was exhausted. The Scotch was hitting him like Merlin Olsen in his prime.
    “Well, I know,” she said, standing up and beginning to pace. “You haven’t got anything to lose but your life sentence. What more can they do to you?”
    “But I don’t have any idea how to go about it.”
    “Listen, you’ve got me, and I’ve read all the books and seen all the movies. … Now, there are two key elements in all that you just told me—no, three. First”—she ticked them off on her fingers—“there’s the unknown stuff Goldie was going to tell you that would fix somebody, presumably Aaron Roth. What was it? Second, you say there never was any real investigation, which means that there could still be one … and third, who was trying to frame you?”
    “Frame me?”
    “The call to the police. Obviously someone knew you were coming, killed Goldie, tipped off the cops, and let nature take its course.”
    “Christ …”
    “You’ve got to conduct your own investigation, Toby.”
    “Sure, with my face on every front page in California.”
    Slowly she came and stood in front of him. “Think. There’s always an angle, a way to do things in Hollywood. Never forget that.”

6
    S HE LEFT HIM ALONE IN the late afternoon while she went into Cresta Vista. He sat by the fire with a cup of coffee cooling beside him and tried to read. That didn’t work. He thought about turning on the radio, decided he wasn’t quite ready for reality. It was snowing again, and as darkness slid down from the mountaintops, he lost sight of the towering pines, the lake, the road. He tried very hard to remember how the innocent man tracked down the killer in books and movies. He thought about his own books and screenplays, but that was all completely different: it was all planned in notebooks and stacks of filing cards, and nothing was going to go wrong you couldn’t fix. You had a plan, you stuck to it. And now for something completely different — real life!
    When she came back, her face was flushed from the cold and there was snow in her hair and she was carrying a bag from the Rexall store. She hung up her coat and pushed him down into a chair at the round butcher-block kitchen table.
    “Now, we’re going to work a small order of miracle here,” she said, smiling brightly. “You’re going to walk out of here a new man.”
    The guard in the hangar had said something like that to him. He saw the man’s face, the apologetic eyes, smelled the oily hangar. The tiny plane was being wheeled around before him. … She was turning the hot-water tap on full blast, dropping towels into the steaming sink. She threw an apron over his shoulders and cinched it up tight around his neck. She put a scissors on the kitchen table. He started to stand up.
    “Come on,” she said. “Give me a break, okay? While you were talking, I was thinking. I’ve got a plan that makes perfect sense, assuming you want to go ahead and see what we can turn up about the real killer.”
    “We?”
    She ignored his curiosity. “It’s your old face that’s going to be all over every front page in California … not your new one. Trust me.”
    “I hate people who say ‘trust me’ and ‘have a nice day.’ I want to kill them—”
    “You really shouldn’t say things about wanting to kill people, Toby. Coming from you, it’s not too terribly funny. Now, sit still and look up here.” She took the measure of his face, a comb in one hand, the scissors in the other. He shuddered. “You’re not