– but he wrenched the. 45 away from the target it wanted, and pointed it at Orpheus. Fired. Felt it jump in his hand, glimpsed Orphy's brains splash. He fired it wildly at the others till it expended its magazine – with the last round, the light bulb exploded and the room went dark.
He threw the gun into the darkness and spun, careened into the hall. Sprinted for the front door.
He stumbled through the trash. Bottles and cans rebounded from his feet; he felt his heels crunch something that was probably a spine. A fading murmur of gratitude came from underfoot. Then he was outdoors and racing across the terrace. Someone lunged from the shadows under an oak tree and he felt a hand close around his wrist and he shrieked his best approximation of a karate yell and slammed a fist into a soft part of whoever it was. They went flailing down and he kept going, tearing through brush and feeling it tear through his skin, until he got to the black metal fence. He was over it in seconds, wailing one long note like a siren the whole way over. Dropped to the other side, ignored the pain in his ankles and ran on. Another fence. It was nothing. He went up it like a cat up a treetrunk. Dropped into the sand on the other side. Thought he heard a really pissed-off yell behind him. They hadn't expected him to get away.
He just kept going, shouting hoarsely, 'Not me you fuckers!' He kept going, running at random into the brittle, aromatic brush of the countryside, until his legs stopped working. He fell into sand and rocks.
After a spinning while, the sobbing started. With that, came strength to crawl.
It didn't matter how he went. He just had to keep going.
Culver City, Los Angeles
Prentice had been sitting with a stack of books at the table in the Los Angeles main library since eleven a.m. It was almost two. His butt hurt from the chair and his stomach growled, but something kept him there. He imagined Amy saying, You always did give up too easily, Tom. Like with me…
He shook himself, and focused on the book. It wouldn't do to let the Amy obsession haunt him again. He turned the page, and then he saw them. Sam and Judy Denver.
The book was called Those Fabulous Hollywood Parties. The Denvers had been known for their parties. Prentice was looking for anything he could find about them – he wanted to get some kind of impression of them, and judge how likely it was that Mitch was actually being held out there…
He'd just about given up on finding them in this book – it seemed to focus on the old Hollywod Babylon sort of parties from the days of silent movies. Too early for the Denvers.
But here they were – there names caught his eye, first, in boldface under the photo. Not the names 'Sam and Judy Denver.' It said ' Mrs. Stutgart and Future Husband, Mr. Samuel Denver.' The date was 1929. Here was a middle aged woman and an older man in Roaring Twenties fashions, Denver holding eight champagne glasses clutched together at the stems like a bouquet in his hands, Mrs. Stutgart slopping champagne over them as if to fill all eight at once. Both of them laughing. Oliver Hardy looking on, making a comical face of mock astonishment; Faye Wray drunkenly leaning on Hardy with one of her dainty feet cocked up behind her. Another man stood rather stiffly in the background in an immaculate black tux. Denver's bowtie was undone and his salt and pepper hair rumpled.
Prentice stared. Maybe it was a misprint. This man was far too old, here, to be the man who later made his mark in Hollywood as a television producer. That would be thirty years later. This man was at least sixty. The producer of Honolulu Hello must have been this man's son.
But to the right – under the caption The Merry Widow, and after a rather sensationalistic description of the widowed Mrs. Stutgart's ribald, cocaine-dusted parties – the text related, '… born Elma Hoch, she married the industrialist Albert Stutgart; their relationship was said to be stormy and it was, in fact, during a storm that poor Albert was mysteriously lost overboard during a transatlantic crossing to New York. It was some years later before she married Sam Denver and became Mrs. 'Judy' Denver. Sam was later to become a successful television producer.
'In the late '30s and early '40s the parties at the Doublekey Ranch faded noticeably after nasty remarks by L.A. columnists regarding certain of Elma's visitors who were alleged to be high functionaries in Germany's Nazi party. The man shown in the background behind Faye Wray and Oliver Hardy has been identified only as a 'Mr. Heingeman, a follower of the German firebrand Mr. Adolf Hitler'.
'Sam and 'Judy' were childless but for a time ran a charitable' summer camp for disadvantaged youth at their Malibu ranch. Accusations of child molestation, which were never prosecuted, caused the closing of the 'charitable summer camp' in 1976…'
So it was the same guy. But how old had he been, as a TV producer? Ninety? A hundred?
Prentice got up, stretched, and went to the microfiche stacks. His body begged him for food and his brain implored him for coffee. But he had to know immediately…
In minutes he was at another chair, reading the old newspaper accounts from a fiche projector screen, shadowed over, in spots, with magnified dust particles and what appeared to be the leg of a fly. Variety, early
'70s. A photo of Sam Denver giving an award for documentary film production at a dinner for the Producer's Guild. Maybe the guy's last public appearance, from what Prentice had been able to find out. The picture showed a man in a leisure suit, his hair dark blond. He looked about 40. He looked younger than the picture in the Those Fabuhna Hollywood Parties book. But it was unquestionably the same guy.
Unless – it was a son by another wife. That must be it.
It took Prentice another ten minutes to locate an encyclopedia of Television History in the nostalgia section. Denver had one brief paragraph. It didn't give a birth date for him. It was the only entry he could find with that omission. It simply said ' Born -? ' The last remark about him was, 'Denver married the widow of industrialist Albert Stutgart in 1946. He has no children as of this writing.'
It was him.
So what? The guy was probably into health foods and plastic surgery. Maybe he looked older in that photo from the 20s than he really was. But looking at the picture, he had a nasty feeling of recognition. An ugly certainty.
Prentice decided to check the microfiche files one more time. There might be an article about the child molestation incident…
The house was only a mile from the library. It was a small, stucco house with Spanish tile roof and a row of sickly geraniums in a red wooden box on the porch railing. Prentice pressed the buzzer for the third time.
A raucous voice inside said, 'Awright, keep your pants on!' It was followed by mimicry in a weird little cartoon voice, '' Awright, keepapantin! ' The door opened and a woman with a parrot on her shoulder scowled at him from the other side of the screen. She was somewhere in her sixties, probably, her hair puffed out with the odd shade of blue-silver that some old ladies affect, her face jowly, her hooded eyes as green as the parrot. She wore a mu-mu with scarlet and blue flowers; the bright green parrot crapped on the print of a nasturtium on the old woman's right shoulder, and shifted its footing, torquing its head to peer at Prentice with one hostile eye. 'All I can say is, you better not be selling anything,' the woman snapped. 'I needed that nap, boy.'
'Actually – ' Well what was he going to tell her? How was he going to get her to open up about it? With an inward sigh, he chose the one route that would probably work. Lies mixed with the truth. 'I'm a writer. A screenwriter. My name's Tom Prentice. I have been, uh, researching a story about Wendy Forrester -'
'She's dead. Did your research tell you that?'
'Well – no. Uh – when did she die?'
'A year after her lovely little summer vacation. That much you can find out yourself. I'm not stupid enough to tell you anything more without a contract.'
'What? A…?'
'You heard me. You want the story, you people have to buy it. I owe it to that poor child to get a little something for her story.'
Prentice almost laughed aloud at this pretzeled logic. But managed instead to say, 'I see. Story rights for the film. Well, it's not that far along. We don't know if there's enough of interest…'
'A twelve-year-old child driven to suicide by the filthy molesting of a TV producer? If you want to believe the suicide part of it.'
Prentice held in his surprise. He hadn't seen anything in the article about the suicide. But then, it had happened much later. 'What do you mean, if you want to believe that part of it?'
'I think those bastards killed them both.'
'Both…?'
