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 towards 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 Patrick 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 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.”