Hollywood Gothic Read Free Page A

down through his seat belt until it caught him under the chin and wrung his neck—the evidence gave no indication of gentleness.
    When the rolling had stopped, Challis was cramped, upside down, and his own blood was running out of his nose. One leg had been bent unnaturally against the metal seat back, his trouser leg was torn, there was blood smeared across his kneecap, and the knuckles of both hands were scraped raw against metal which might otherwise have done even more damage to his head. Without really considering what had just happened, he used all his strength to lever himself out of the upside-down awkwardness. He saw the corpses of the guard and the other prisoner, smelled the flight fuel, which was undoubtedly leaking from ruptured lines, and reached out to steady himself. He missed whatever he had been reaching for and fell, lightheaded and in shock, forward onto what had been the ceiling of the cabin and was now the floor. Face to face with the strangled prisoner, whose tongue and eyeballs were ruptured and bleeding and protruding, he fainted.

2
    G OLDIE ROTH HAD NEVER REALLY grown up, which was both good and bad. Good, because she remembered her childhood in remarkably acute detail, due in large part, Challis had always presumed, to the fact that she had never entirely left it. She remembered the parties at which her famous mother and powerful father had presided, with an eye and ear for literal recall which is common among the young. For instance, her grandfather, Solomon Roth, came more fully to life in her wicked little recollections than he ever quite seemed in real life; and she had a sure hand at literary caricature when it came to describing Solomon Roth’s famous employees.
    When she finally put together a novel—which was widely held to be a public exorcising of her own private demons—it dealt with her coming of age at “Bella Donna,” the unfortunate name of the Bel Air mansion where they all lived and which was destroyed in a famous fire. It was not exactly a loving portrait of those years, and one rather good review was headlined, “Slow Poison by Tincture of Bella Donna.” It sold very well on the West Coast and appeared fleetingly on The New York Times ’s best-seller list. The paperback edition eventually brought in nearly half a million dollars, and that was as far as her literary career went. But she was finally independent of the family—that is, her father, Aaron Roth—which was just as well, because her welcome in Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and the other prominent outposts of the film community, while never very warm, was effectively worn out. A lot of people were put out about what she had written, particularly those individuals making appearances in the novel’s pages under funny names but always with the right initials. Those most irritated were sometimes heard to gloat that Goldie never appeared at the Bel Air Country Club following the book’s publication, a minor triumph, however, since she had never appeared there before the book’s publication, either. But, still, she was a kind of outcast in her own country. She was no longer welcome at many private homes where she had once been a regular decoration, and for a time Seraglio, the new postfire mansion, was off-limits, as well. Solomon Roth had fought to rescind her banishment and, as always, had finally prevailed. But it had all been quite an ordeal, though vastly amusing to Goldie, who was in her mid-twenties and really didn’t give a shit.
    So maybe it wasn’t good that she remembered everything. It depended on your point of view, which, Challis reasoned, made it just like everything else in life. From his point of view, at least when he first met her, it was good. Her unfettered lifestyle, her irreverence and wit—however childish and rude—at the expense of the show-business Establishment turned him on: he was introduced to her at Aaron and Kay’s annual Fourth of July holocaust shortly before the storm accompanying