Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

FIVE

While Jerry was giving thanks for his new life, and Tammy was dealing with the grim illusions in her kitchen sink, Maxine was in a very different frame of mind. Her injuries were remarkably slight, given all that she'd gone through. Within a week she was physically ready to return to her offices and attempt to pick up business. But most of the calls she got in the first week weren't business calls at all but gently inquiring conversations that rapidly gave way to interrogation. It seemed as though everyone in Hollywood wanted to know about events at the house in Coldheart Canyon.

In truth, she had no desire to tell her story to anyone, not even her closest friends. Ghosts and rooms laid with tile providing visions of another world—this was not the stuff she could have shared with any of her contemporaries without being mocked. But she had to say something, or she was going to start making even more enemies than she already had. So she concocted a version of events without supernatural elements. In the censored version, Todd had indeed been hiding away because of work done to his face (it was no use lying about that any longer: he'd admitted to the surgery at her party), and there he'd been stalked and finally— sadly—murdered by his stalker. Most of the people she talked to accepted this bowdlerized version of events, at least for the duration of the conversation. But those few loyal sources she still had around town reported something very different back to her. Everyone had his own version of what had happened in Coldheart Canyon, ranging from the ludicrous to the actionable, and they were spreading it around freely. Whatever the version of the story—and they ranged from murder mystery to ghost-stories—they had this in common: Maxine was the villain.

She was to blame for knowingly putting her innocent client in a house that was haunted; she was to blame for not warning him that a close friend was a murderer (this version had started in The Enquirer, and required another star as murderer. The Enquirer, of course, claimed to know who it was, and would soon be in a position to reveal the name of the guilty party. What they could already say with confidence was that Maxine Frizelle had known of the plan against Todd's life, but simply hadn't taken it seriously). She, in short, was the reason he was dead. It seemed that nothing she could say or do persuaded people that this wasn't the case. Years of resentment toward her surfaced now as her enemies elaborated version after version of what had gone on in the Canyon, each one less flattering to Maxine than the one before.

She eventually gave up attempting to put people straight on such matters. People would believe what the hell they wanted to anyway. She'd learned that after twenty-two years in the business. You could sometimes guide people's opinions, but if they didn't want to buy what you had to sell you could shout yourself hoarse trying to make them do it and it would never work.

After a few days of fruitless endeavor she became curiously immune to all the gossip flying around, and just got on with trying to get to see some new talent. She was an agent without a major client, which meant that as far as the town was concerned there was no reason to take her calls, especially as she wasn't playing ball and offering up the inside scoop on what a psychic hired by the Fox Channel to wander round the Canyon called "the most haunted piece of real estate in Hollywood."

In other words, everybody knew there was more to this—a lot more than they had been told so far—and it was only a matter of time before somebody started to talk.

That somebody was Martin Rooney, the detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department who'd done the initial work on the Pickett case. At fifty-eight he was very close to retirement, and was looking at a life on a middle-ranking detective's pension. Life would not be lush, he knew. Although he didn't have an expensive life-style he had all the normal outgoings: alimony, a mortgage, car payments (he ran three cars, one of his few concessions to self-indulgence), plus a well-stocked bar and a habit of smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day. He'd already calculated the dip in his standard of living he'd have to take when he left the force. It was going to be substantial.

But here—dropping into his lap like a gift from God—was the answer to all his problems. He'd been told the story first by the Lauper woman, and later by Maxine Frizelle. Though their accounts had been outlandish, to say the least, they had also been remarkably consistent. Something weird had happened up in the Canyon and whether it was true in part or not at all scarcely mattered. What mattered to Rooney was that people loved this kind of thing. There was a profit to be made here. Enough to make his retirement look a lot more cozy.

He began to make surreptitious copies of the interviews and smuggle them out of the station, with an eye to assembling them all into book form. It wasn't hard to do; if he asked for copies of a record in order to advance some particular aspect of the case then nobody challenged the request. In a short time he had amassed at home eleven bulging files of material on the "Canyon" case: enough to start editing and collating.

What he needed was a point of view other than his own. After all, he wasn't at the heart of all this: he was simply an onlooker, coming in after the drama was over. What his book needed was an insider whose story would become its backbone. He decided to approach Maxine Frizelle.

"You want to do what?"

"I'm going to write a book about events in Coldheart Canyon, as everyone insists on calling it. I was hoping I could count on your involvement. Your point of view, Miss Frizelle, would make the book a good deal stronger."

"You've had all the facts you're going to get from me, Detective."

"Wait, wait!" Rooney said. "Before you put the phone down on me, think about it. Todd Pickett was your client for how long?"

"Eleven years."

"So think of this as your chance to set the record straight once and for all. The good, the bad and the ugly."

"If I were ever to choose to set the record straight, Mister Rooney, it would not be with a cop as a co-author."

"Oh, I wasn't going to write any of this. I was going to get a ghostwriter in to do that."

"Then I'm really missing something here, Rooney," Maxine said, summoning up her most withering tone. "What exactly is your contribution to this project?"

"My experience of almost four decades in the LAPD. I worked on the Manson case—"

"This is nothing like Manson. Not remotely—"

"Will you let me finish? I'm not saying the cases are identical. But we still have a lot of parallels. The brutal deaths of several high-profile Hollywood people, all with some connection to the occult."

"Todd never had anything to do with that kind of thing. And you can quote me."

"Well somebody in that house did. I have copies of photographs of every inch of the place. There are occult symbols hammered into all the thresholds, did you know that? Several symbols—probably East European in origin—were removed from the area around the back door around the time Mister Pickett died. He may even have been responsible for their removal. Do you have any comment to make about any of that?"

"Yes. It's preposterous. And if you try to tie Todd to any of that kind of stuff you're going to be in deep trouble."

"That's a risk I'm willing to take. But I am going to write the book, Ms. Frizelle, with or without your assistance."

"I doubt you can do that, Rooney. You got that information because you were a cop. You can't go using it to make money."

"I wouldn't be the first and I won't be the last," Rooney said. "Frankly, I don't see what the hell your problem is, unless you were planning to do it yourself. Is that it? Am I rainin' on your parade here?"

"No. I have no intention of writing my own version of events."

"Then help me do mine," Rooney said, his tone perfectly reasonable. "I'll throw a piece of the action your way if that's what this is about. How does five percent sound?"

"Don't make this any worse than it already is. I don't want your blood money. Have a little decency, for God's sake. Todd is dead. So are a lot of other people. This isn't the time to be thinking about making a profit."

"I'm not going to do a hatchet job on him. I swear. Your ex-client's reputation is perfectly safe with me. Okay, so I hear he did a few drugs. A lot of coke, I hear, especially when he worked with Smotherman. And the plastic surgery. Again, no big deal. I mean, I'll have to write about it, but I won't make him look bad. I promise you."

"Why the hell would I rely on your promises, Rooney?"

There was a brief silence.

"So that's a no?" Rooney finally said.

"Yes. That's a big, fat no."

"Well, don't say I didn't ask."

"And for the record, Mister Rooney, let me say this: if you do want to try and write this book, you go ahead and try. I promise you will have so many lawyers crawling up your ass you'll think they're breeding up there."

"Very nice. Very ladylike."

"Nobody ever mistook me for a lady, Rooney. Now get the hell off my phone. I need to call my lawyer."