Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

Now here she was, and here he was, and she could touch him all she liked, but nothing on earth could have persuaded her to do so.

What she'd been looking for in that touch was no longer there to be found. He'd gone, and what remained, as she'd just seen in the room below (yellow, purple, red), was not worth her attention.

She turned from his corpse, fighting the instinct to say good-bye to it, and finally—unable to resist the force of instinct—saying it anyway. Then she returned to the kitchen, where she found that Jerry had succeeded in coaxing Maxine to her feet, and was now rummaging in the fridge for something cold for her to drink.

'I'm afraid there's only beer,' he said. 'Oh no, wait. There's some milk here too. You want some milk?'

'Milk,' she said, her eyes suddenly brightening, like a child's eyes. 'Yes. A glass of milk.'

Jerry carefully poured a brimming glass for her, and she drank it down, staring out of the window between gulps. 'As soon as you're ready,' Jerry prompted her, 'we should go. Yes?' She nodded as she drank.

There were new dins from below, suggesting that the ghosts were up to fresh mischief. Nobody wanted to be around when they finally tired of their labors downstairs, and decided to ascend.

'Eppstadt?' Maxine said, her mind apparently sharpened by the milk. 'What happened to Eppstadt?'

'I told you,' Tammy reminded her.

'Oh yes. He's dead, isn't he?'

'Yes, he's dead.'

'And the waiter?'

'Joe?'

'Yes, Joe.'

'He's dead too.'

There was a long silence between them then, while Maxine emptied her glass, which gave Tammy an unhappy moment to picture the bodies that were littered around the house. Todd in the hallway, Sawyer somewhere in the garden, Joe the Waiter and Eppstadt in the bowels of the house; and Katya? Many places, by now.

'We should be thankful,' Jerry said.

'For what?' Maxine wanted to know.

'For getting out of here alive.'

'Let's be thankful when we see Sunset Boulevard,' she said, a little of the old Maxine showing, 'not before.'

The noise in the house was still escalating as they left, and when Tammy looked back she saw that there was a crack over the front door, two inches wide, which zigzagged all the way up to the eaves, like a bolt of black lightning.

They got into Tammy's car, and drove down the hill. Maxine's spurt of fortitude gave out halfway down, and she began to cry pitifully, but Tammy was having none of it.

'Shush,' she said, half gently, half not. 'We're not having any of that, you hear? It's over, Maxine. It's over.'

Of course that wasn't strictly true. Her mind turned to the creatures she'd encountered in the Canyon during the night; the children. What would happen to them? And what other perverse miracles had the Devil's Country worked upon the anatomies of those who'd ventured there? She vaguely wondered if perhaps she or Jerry, both of whom had spent some considerable time in that godless place, would have something to show for their presence there. She would have to watch herself closely, at least for a while.

By now they were almost at the bottom of the hill.

'We have to go and report all this to the police,' Tammy said. 'Together.'

'Now?' Maxine said. 'I couldn't possibly.'

'We have to, Maxine. There are bodies up there. We don't want to be accused of murder.'

'They're going to think we're all crazy,' Maxine commented.

'Well, that's easily solved,' Jerry said. 'We'll bring them up here, and they can see it all for themselves. That'll change their minds.'

'Suppose they do think we're responsible?' Maxine said. 'People like to point fingers in this damn town.'

'Well they won't be pointing any fingers at us,' Tammy said. 'We'll explain.'

'Explain?' Maxine said. 'How the hell will we ever explain?'

'We'll start at the beginning and go on until we're done. We've got nothing to hide.'

'There'll be no end to it,' Maxine said. 'Now Todd's dead, the press is going to be all over us. They're going to be digging up every sordid little story about him, whether it's true or not. They'll print any piece of garbage that floats down the sewer. It's going to go on for months. And you think in the middle of all this the truth is going to be heard? Forget it. It's going to be a circus.'

'You don't have to be a part of the circus,' Jerry said. 'None of us do. We can just say no, and walk away. Let them write whatever they want to write. They're going to do it anyway.'

'True enough,' Maxine sighed. 'I just wanted to try to guard his reputation.'

'Maybe if you'd guarded him a little better when he was still around we wouldn't be in this mess,' Tammy said. She caught Maxine's reflection in the mirror; the corners of her mouth turned down in misery. 'I'm sorry,' Tammy said. 'Maybe that was a bit sharp.'

'No,' Maxine replied. 'I let him down. He needed me and I walked in the opposite direction. Mea culpa.'

'What does that mean?'

'I'm responsible?' Maxine said. 'And I am. Don't think I don't know it.'

Her reply brought an end to the exchange. They drove on in silence until they reached Langley Road, which in turn brought them on to Doheny Drive, and finally down onto Sunset Boulevard.

It was a busy intersection, the lights slow. They had to wait through three changes, creeping closer to the main tide of traffic; but there was a simple contentment for all three in sitting in the car and watching the buses and the messenger bikes and the Beverly Hills Rolls-Royces drive on past. Life going on, in other words, in its usual way. People going east, people going west, all oblivious to the fact that just a short drive from this loud, bright place was a cleft in the rock of the City of Angels which was deep enough to conceal miracles.

PART ELEVEN

The Last Chase

ONE

News, like a life-form, is divided into orders and classes and kinds. Thus, what was deemed worthy of note on the front page of Variety (the grosses of Todd Pickett's last four pictures, the fact that his agent, Maxine Frizelle, had been present at the death-scene, some sketchy details about the history of the house in the Canyon) was not thought appropriate for the front page of the LA Times (the fact that there were multiple bodies at the scene, suggesting some vague connection with the horrors of the Manson Murders; a brief synopsis of Todd's career; elsewhere, an obituary, and elsewhere again a sincere, if hastily edited, appreciation of Pickett's contribution to cinema); none of which was again deemed appropriate for The National Enquirer, which put together a special edition centered on the deaths of Todd, Gary Eppstadt and—as they put it—'the unfortunate, unnamed victims who were pulled down into the same spiral of decadence and death that claimed the Hollywood power-players,' but padded the issue out with the Old Faithfuls: Haunted Hollywood, The Tragic Deaths of the Young and the Beautiful— Marilyn; James Dean; Jayne Mansfield— 'Doomed Souls Who Paid the Ultimate Price for Fame! '; and all this gutter journalism of a high order by comparison with the real bottom-feeders, the journalists of The Globe, who printed, among countless lurid absurdities which they had clearly invented at their editorial meetings, a number of facts that were paradoxically closer to the truth of the