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"Hell," I said, "I wonder why he let us have these?"
"Whatta you see?"
"Nothing. Zero. Zilch."
"Gimme." Crumley grabbed and used one eye on the news, one on the road. It was starting to rain.
" 'Emily Starr, dead at twenty-five,' " he read.
"Watch it!" I cried as the car drifted.
He scanned another paper. " 'Corinne Kelly divorces Von Sternberg.' "
He hurled the paper over his shoulder.
" 'Rebecca Standish in hospital. Fading fast.' "
Another toss, another paper. " 'Genevieve Carlos marries Goldwyn's son.' So?"
I handed him three more between flashes of rain. They all went into the backseat.
"He said he wasn't crackers. Well?"
I shuffled the news. "We're missing something. He wouldn't keep these for the hell of it."
"No? Nuts collect peaches, plums collect nuts. Fruit salad."
"Why would Constance-" I stopped. "Hold on."
"I'm holding." Crumley clenched the wheel.
"Inside, society page. Big picture. Constance, good Lord, twenty years younger, and the mummy, that guy up there, younger, with more flesh, not bad looking, their wedding, and on one side Louis B. Mayer's assistant, Marty Krebs, and on the other, Carlotta Q. Califia, noted astrologer!"
"Who told Constance to marry up on Mount Lowe. Astrologer forecasts, Constance takes the dive. Find the obituary page."
"Obit— ?"
"Find it! Whatta you see?"
"Holy cow! The daily horoscope and the name-Queen Califia!"
"What's the forecast? Fair? Mild? Good day to start a garden or marry a sucker? Read it!"
" 'Happy week, happy day. Accept all proposals, large or small.' So, what's next?"
"We got to find Califia."
"Why?"
"Don't forget-she's got a red circle around her name, too. We got to see her before something awful happens. That red crucifix means death and burial. Yes?"
"No," said Crumley. "Old Tutankhamen up on Mount Lowe is still flopping around, and his name's red-inked, too, with a crucifix!"
"But he feels someone's coming to get him."
"Who, Constance? That knee-high wonder?"
"All right, the old man's alive. But that doesn't mean Califia hasn't already been wiped out. Old Rattigan didn't give us much. Maybe she can give us more. All we need is an address."
"That's all? Hey." Crumley suddenly swerved to the curb and got out. "Most people never think, Constance didn't think, we didn't think. One place we never looked. The Yellow Pages! What a goof! The Yellow Pages!"
He was across the sidewalk and into a public phone booth to scrabble through some beat-up Yellow Pages, tear out a page, and tote it back. "Old phone number, useless. But maybe a half-ass address."
He shoved the page in my face. I read: QUEEN CALIFIA. Palmistry. Phrenology. Astrology. Egyptian Necrology. Your life is mine. Welcome.
And the damned zodiac street locale.
"So!" said Crumley, as close to hyperventilation as he ever got. "Constance tipped us to the Egyptian relic and the relic names Califia who said marry the beast!"
"We don't know that!"
"Like hell we don't. Let's see."
He put the car in gear and we went fast, to see.
CHAPTER TWELVE
we drove up near Queen Califia's Psychic Research Lodge, dead center of Bunker Hill. Crumley gave it a sour eye. Then I nodded to one side and he saw what to him was a lovely sight: CALLAHAN AND ORTEGA FUNERAL PARLOR.
That raised his spirits. "It's like a homecoming," he admitted.
Our jalopy stopped. I got out.
"You coming in?" I said.
Crumley sat staring out the windshield, hands on the steering wheel, as if we were still moving. "How come," he said, "everything seems downhill with us?"
"You coming in? I need you."
"Outta the way."
He was halfway up the steep concrete steps and then the cracked cement walk before he stopped, surveyed the big white dilapidated bird cage of a house, and said, "Looks like the half bakery where they bake your misfortune cookies."
We continued up the walk. On the way we met a cat, a white goat, and a peacock. The peacock flirted its thousand eyes, watching us pass. We made it to the front door. When I knocked, an unseasonable blizzard of paint snowflakes rained on my shoes.
"If that's what holds this joint up, it won't be long," observed Crumley.
I rapped on the door with my knuckles. Inside I heard what sounded like a massive portable safe being trundled across a hardwood floor. Something heavy was shoved up against the other side of the door.
I raised my hand again, but a high sparrow voice inside cried, "Go away!"
"I just want-"
“Go away!”
"Five minutes," I said. "Four, two, one, for God's sake. I need your help."
"No," the voice shrilled, "I need yours."
My mind spun like a Rolodex. I heard the mummy. I echoed him.
"You ever wonder where the name California came from?" I said.
Silence. The high voice lowered to almost a whisper. "Damn."
Three sets of locks rattled.
"Nobody knows that about California. Nobody."
The door opened a few inches.
"Okay, give," the voice said.
A hand like a great plump starfish thrust out.
"Put it there!"
I put my hand in hers.
"Turn it over."
I turned it, palm up.
Her hand seized it.
"Calmness."
Her hand massaged mine; her thumb circumnavigated the lines on my palm.
"Can't be," she whispered.
More quiet motions as she thumbed the pads under my fingers.
"Is," she sighed.
And then, "You remember being born!"
"How did you know that?"
"You must be the seventh son of a seventh son!"
"No," I said, "just me, no brothers."
"My God." Her hand jumped in mine. "You're going to live forever!"
"No one does."
" You will. Not your body. But what you do. What do you do?"
"I thought my life was in your hands."
She let out a breathless laugh.
"Jesus. An actor? No. Shakespeare's bastard son."
"He had no sons."
"Melville, then. Herman Melville's by-blow."
"Wish it were true."
"Is."
I heard the great weight behind the door roll back on creaking wheels. The portal drifted wide.
I saw an immense woman in an immense crimson velvet queen's robe receding on roller wheels in a metal throne across the hardwood floor to the far side of the room. She stopped by a table on which rested not one, but four crystal balls, coruscant with light from a green-and-amber Tiffany lamp. Queen Califia, astrologer, palmist, phrenologist, past and futurist, sank inside three hundred mountainous pounds of too-too-solid flesh, her stare flashing X rays. A vast iron safe hulked in the shadows.
"I don't bite."
I stepped in. Crumley followed.
"But leave the door open," she added.
I heard the peacock scream in the yard and dared to hold out my other hand.
Queen Califia reared back as if burned.
"You know Greene, the novelist?" she gasped. "Graham Greene?"
I nodded.
"Wrote about a priest who lost faith. Then witnessed a miracle he himself had caused. The shock at his renewed faith almost killed him."
"So?"
"So." She stared at my hand as if it were disconnected from my arm. "Lord."
"Is it happening to you?" I said. "What happened to that priest?"
"Oh, God!"
"Did you lose your faith, your power to heal?"
"Yes," she murmured.
"And now, just now, it all came back?"
"Dammit! Yes!"
I crushed my hand to my chest to blind it.
"How'd you guess that?" I said.
"No guess. Scares the hell out of me."
She saw the wedding invitation and the newspaper in my outstretched hand.
"You've been up to see him," she said.
"You looked. That's cheating."
That brought a half smile and then a snort. "People ricochet off him and end up here."
"Not often enough, I think. May I sit?" I said. "I'll fall if I don't."
She nodded at a chair a few feet away, a safe distance. I fell into it.
Crumley, ignored, looked peevish.
"You were saying?" I said. "People don't visit old Rattigan often. No one knows he's alive on Mount Lowe. But someone went there and yelled at him today."
"She yelled?" The great mountain almost melted in remembrance, "I wouldn't let her in."
"Her?"
"It's always a mistake"-Queen Califia cast a glance toward the crystal balls-"to guess futures and, damn fool, tell them. I give hints, not facts. I won't tell people what stocks to buy, what flesh to borrow. Diets, yes, I sell vitamins, Chinese herbs, but not longevity."
"You just did."
"You're different." She leaned. The rollers under her massive chair squealed.
"The future lies ahead of you. I've never seen a future so clear. But you are in terrible danger. I see all the time that you have to live, but someone could destroy it. Be careful!"
She paused for a long moment, closed her eyes, and then said, "You her friend? You know who I mean."
I said, "Yes-and no."
"Everyone says that. She's black and white and wild all over.”
"Who are we talking about?"
"We don't need names. I wouldn't let her in. An hour ago." I looked at Crumley. "We're catching up, getting close." "Don't," said Califia. "The way she yelled I thought she might have a knife. Til never forgive you!' she screamed. 'You gave us the wrong road maps, down instead of up, lost instead of found. May you roast in hell!' Then I heard her drive away. I won't sleep at all tonight."
"Did she say-this sounds crazy-where she was going?" "Not crazy at all," said Califia. "I would think that since she went first to that old fool on Mount Lowe who she dropped after one bad night, then me who put her up to it, well, next, why not the poor sap who performed the ceremony? She wants to get us all together, to push us off a cliff!"
"She wouldn't do that."
"How would you know? How many women you had in your life?"
At last I said, sheepishly, "One."
Queen Califia mopped her face with a handkerchief big enough to cover half her bosom, regained her composure, and slowly advanced on me, propelling herself on glider wheels with dainty pushes of her incredibly small shoes. I could not take my eyes off how tiny her feet were compared with the vast territory above, and the great lunar face that loomed on that expanse. I saw the ghost of Constance drowned beneath that flesh. Queen Califia shut her eyes.
"She's using you. You love her?"
"Carefully."
"Keep your clothes on and your motor running. She ask you to get her with child?"
"Not in so many words."
"No words, just bastard stillborns. She whelped monsters down the whole L.A. basin, lousy Hollywood Boulevard, dead-end Main. Burn her bed, scatter the ashes, call a priest."
"Which priest, where?"
"I'll put you in touch. Now…" She paused, refusing to spit out the name. "Our friend. She's always missing. One of her dodges, to make men panic. One hour with her does it. They riot in the streets. You know the game Uncle Wig-gily? Well, Uncle Wiggily says jump back ten hops, head for the Hen House, quit!"
"But she needs me!"
"No. She dines on spoilage. Blessed are the wicked who relish wickedness. Your bones will knead her bread. If she were here, I'd run her down with my chair. God, she made Rome's ruins. Hell," she added. "Let me see your palm again." Her massive chair creaked. Her wall of flesh threatened.
"You going to take back what you saw in my hand?"
"No. I just say what I see in an open palm. You will have another life beyond this! Tear up that newspaper. Burn the wedding invitation. Leave town. Tell her to die. But tell her cross-country by phone. Now, out!"
"Where do I go from here?"
"God forgive me." She shut her eyes and whispered, "Check that wedding invitation."
I raised the invite and stared.
"Seamus Brian Joseph Rattigan, St. Vibiana's Cathedral, celebrant."
"Go tell 'im his sister is in two kinds of hell, and to send holy water. Scram! I got lots to do."
"Like what?"
"Throw up," she said.
I clutched Father Seamus Brian Joseph Rattigan in my sweaty palm, backed off, and bumped into Crumley.
"Who are you?. " said Califia, finally noticing my shadow.
"I thought you knew," Crumley said.
We went out and shut the door.
The whole house shifted with her weight.
"Warn her," Califia cried. "Tell her, don't come back."
I looked at Crumley. "She didn't tell your future!"
"Thank the Lord," said Crumley, "for small blessings."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BACK down the steep cement steps we went, and under the pale moonlight by the car, Crumley peered into my face. "What's that mad-dog look?"
"I've just joined a church!"
"Get in, for Christ's sake!"
I got in, running a fever.
"Where to?"
"St. Vibiana's Cathedral."
"Holy mackerel!"
He banged the starter.
"No." I exhaled. "I couldn't stand another face-on. Home, James, a shower, three beers, and to bed. We'll catch Constance at dawn."
We passed Callahan and Ortega, nice and slow. Crumley looked almost happy.
Before the shower, the beers, and the snooze, I pasted seven or eight newsprint front pages on the wall over my bed, where I might wake in the night in hopes of solutions.
All the names, all the pictures, all the headlines big and small saved for mysterious or not mysterious reasons.
Behind me," Crumley snorted. "Horse apples! You going to commune with news that was dead as soon as it was printed?"
"By dawn, sure, they just might drop off the wall, slide under my eyelids, and get stuck in the creative adhesive in my brain."
"Creative adhesive! Japanese bushido! American bull! Once those things are off the wall, like you, do they propagate?"
"Why not? If you don't put in, you never get out."
"Wait while I kill this." Crumley drank. "Lie down with porcupines, get up with pandas?" He nodded at all those pictures, names, and lives. "Constance in there somewhere?"
"Hidden."
"Hit the shower. I'll stand guard on the obituaries. If they move, I'll yell. How does a margarita strike you as nightcap.”
"I thought you'd never ask," I said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
st. Vibiana's Cathedral awaited us. Downtown L.A. Skid Row. At noon, heading east, we stayed off the main boulevards.
"Ever seen W. C. Fields in If I Had a Million? Bought some old tin lizzies and rammed road hogs. Super," said Crumley. "That's why I hate highways. I want to roadkill. You listening?"
"Rattigan," I said. "I thought I knew her." "Hell." Crumley laughed gently. "You don't know anyone. You'll never write the great American novel, because you don't know shoats from shinola. You overestimate character where there is none, so you upchuck fairy princes, virgin milkmaids. Most writers can't even do that, so you go with your taffy pulls, thirteen to the dozen. Let those realists scoop dog doo."
I remained silent.
"Know what your problem is?" Crumley barked, and then softened his voice. "You love people not worth loving."
"Like you, Crum?"
He glanced over cautiously.
"Oh, I'm okay," he admitted. "I've more holes than a sieve, but I haven't fallen through. Hold on!" Crumley hit the brakes. "The pope's home away from home!"
I looked out at St. Vibiana's Cathedral in the midst of the slow-motion desolation of long-dead Skid Row.
"Jesus," I said, "would have built here. You coming in?"
"Hellfires, no! I was kicked outta confession, age twelve, when I skinned my knees on wild women."
"Will you ever take Communion again?"
"When I die. Hop out, buster. From Queen Califia to the Queen of Angels."
I climbed out.
"Say a Hail Mary for me," Crumley said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INSIDE the cathedral it was empty, just after noon, and just one penitent was waiting by the confessional when a priest arrived and beckoned her in.
His face confirmed I was in the right place.
When the woman left, I ducked in the other side of the confessional, tongue-tied.
A shadow moved in the lattice window.
"Well, my son?"
"Forgive me, Father," I blurted out. "Califia."
The other confessional door banged wide with a curse. I opened my door. The priest reared as if I had shot him.
It was Rattigan Deja Vu. Not svelte in ninety-five pounds of suntanned seal-brown flesh, but marrowed in a wire-coat-hanger skeleton-thin Florentine Renaissance priest. Constance's bones hid there, but the flesh skinned over the bones was skull pale, the priest's lips were ravenous for salvation, not bed and sinful breakfasts. Here was Savonarola begging God to forgive his wild perorations, and God silent, with Constance's ghost burning from his eyes, and peering from his skull.
Father Rattigan, riven, found me harmless save for that word, jerked his head toward the vestry, led me in, and shut the door.
"You her friend?"
"No, sir."
"Good!" He caught himself. "Sit. You have five minutes. The cardinal is waiting."
"You had better go."
"Five minutes," said Constance from inside the mask of this genetic twin. "Well?"
"I've just visited-"
"Califia." Father Rattigan exhaled with controlled despair. "The Queen. Sends people she can't help. She has her church, not mine."
"Constance has disappeared again, Father."
"Again?"
"That's what the Queen, ah, Califia said."
I held out the Book of the Dead. Father Rattigan turned its pages.
"Where'd you get this?"
"Constance. She said someone sent it to her. To scare her, maybe, or hurt her, or God knows what. I mean, only she knows if it's a real threat."
"You think she might just be hiding to spoil things for everyone?" He deliberated. "I myself am of two minds. But then there were those who burned Savonarola then and elevate him now. A most peculiar sinner-cum-saint."
"Aren't there similarities, Father?" I dared to say. "Lots of sinners became saints, yes?"
"What do you know about Florence in 1492 when Savonarola made Botticelli burn his paintings?"
"It's the only age I know, sir, Father. Then Savonarola, now Constance…"
"If Savonarola knew her, he'd kill himself. No, no, let me think. I've starved since dawn. Here's bread and wine. Let's have some before I fall."
The good father pulled a loaf and a jug out of the vestry closet, and we sat. Father Rattigan broke the bread, then poured a small wine for himself, and a large for me, which I took gladly.
"Baptist?" he said.
"How did you guess?"
"I'd rather not say."
I tipped back my glass. "Can you help me with Constance, Father?"
"No. Oh, Lord, Lord, maybe."
He refilled my glass.
"Last night. Can it be? I stayed in the confessional late. I felt… as if I were waiting for someone. Finally, near midnight, a woman entered the confessional and for a long while was silent. Finally, like Jesus calling Lazarus, I insisted, and she wept. It all came out. Sins by the pound and the truckload, sins from last year, ten years, thirty years past, she couldn't stop, on and on, night on dreadful night, on and on, and finally she was still and I was about to instruct her with Hail Marys when I heard her running. I checked the other side of the confessional but only smelled perfume. Oh Lord, Lord."
"Your sister's scent?"
"Constance?" Father Rattigan sank back. "Hell burned twice, that perfume."
Last night, I thought. So close. If Crumley and I had only come then.
"You'd better go, Father," I said.
"The cardinal will wait."
"Well," I said, "if she returns, would you call me?"
"No," said the priest. "The confessional's as private as a lawyer's office. Are you that upset?"
"Yes." I twisted the wedding ring on my finger, absently.
Father Rattigan noticed.
"Does your wife know all this?"
"Approximately."
"That sounds like delicatessen morality."
"My wife trusts me."
"Wives do that, God bless them. Does my sister seem worth saving?"
"Doesn't she to you?"
"Dear God, I gave up when she claimed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was a Kama Sutra pose."
"Constance! Still, Father, if she shows up again, could you call my number and hang up? I'd know you were signaling her arrival."
"You do know how to split hairs. Give me your number. I see in you not so much a Baptist but a fair Christian."
I gave him my number as well as Crumley's.
"Just one ring, Father."
The priest studied the numbers. "We all live on the slope. But some, by a miracle, grow roots. Don't wait. Your phone may never ring. But I'll give your number to my assistant, Betty Kelly, too, just in case. Why are you doing this?"
"She was heading fast off a cliff."
"Watch out she doesn't take you with. I'm ashamed I said that. But as a child she skated out and stopped in mid-traffic to laugh."
He fixed me with a bright needle eye. "But why do I tell you this?"
"It's my face."
"Your what?"
"My face. I look in mirrors but never catch myself. The expression always changes before I can trap it. It's got to be a blend of the Boy Jesus and Genghis Khan. It drives my friends crazy."
This relaxed some of the priest's bones. "Does idiot savant sound right?"
"Almost. The school bullies took one look and beat the hell out of me. You were saying?"
"Was I? Yes, well, if that screaming woman was Constance, and her voice seemed different, she gave me orders. Imagine, orders to a priest! Gave me a deadline. Said she'd be back in twenty-four hours. I must give complete forgiveness for all her sins, twenty thousand strong. As if I could assign such mass-market absolution. I told her she must forgive herself, and ask others for forgiveness. God loves you. 'But He doesn't,' she said. And then she was gone."
" Will she come back?"
"With doves on her shoulders or lightning bolts."
Father Rattigan walked me to the front of the cathedral. "And how does she look? Like a siren singing to lure damned sailors to drown. Are you a poor damn sailor?"
"No, just someone who writes people on Mars, Father."
"I hope they are happier than we are. Wait! Good Lord, there was a thing she said. That she was joining a new church. And might not come back to douse my ears."
"What church, Father?"
"Chinese. Chinese and Grauman's. Some church!"
"To many it is. You've been there?"
"To see King of Kings, I found the forecourt superior to the film. You look as if you're about to break and run."
"To the new church, Father. Chinese. Grauman's."
"Stay off the quicksand footprints. Many sinners have sunk there. What film's playing?"
"Abbott and Costello in Jack and the Beanstalk?
"Lamentable."
"Lamentable." I ran.
"Mind the quicksand!" Father Rattigan called after me as I raced out the doors.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
on the way across town I was a hot-air balloon full of Great Expectations. Crumley kept hitting my elbow to make me calm down, calm down. But we had to get to that other church.
"Church!" Crumley muttered. "Since when do double features sideline the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?"
"King Kong! That's when! 1932! Fay Wray kissed my cheek."
"Holy mackerel." Crumley switched on the car radio.
"— afternoon-" a voice said. "Mount Lowe-"
"Listen!" I said, my stomach a chunk of ice.
The voice said, "Death… police… Clarence Rattigan… victim…" A flare of static. "Freak accident… victim smothered, smothered… old newspapers. Recall brothers in Bronx? Saved stacks of old papers that fell and killed the brothers? Newspapers…"
"Turn it off."
Crumley turned it off.
"That poor lost soul," I said.
"Was he really that lost?"
"Lost as you can get without giving it the old heave-ho."
"You want to drive by?"
"Drive by," I said at last, making noises.
"You didn't know him," said Crumley. "Why those noises?"
The last police car was leaving. The morgue van had long since left. A lone policeman on his motorcycle stood at the bottom of Mount Lowe. Crumley leaned out his window.
"Anything to keep us from driving up?"
"Just me," said the officer. "But I'm leaving."
"Were there any reporters?"
"No, it wasn't worth it."
"Yeah," I said, and made more noises.
"Okay, okay," Crumley groused, "wait till I get this damn car aimed before you upchuck your hairball."
I waited and fell apart, silently.
The motorcycle policeman left, and it was a long late afternoon journey up to the ruined temple of Karnak, the destroyed Valley of the Kings, and lost Cairo, or so I said along the way.
"Lord Carnarvon dug up a king, we bury one. I wouldn't mind a grave like this."
"Bull Montana," said Crumley. "He was a wrestling cowboy. Bull."
At the top of the hill there were no ruins, just a vast pyramid of newspapers being rummaged by a bulldozer driven by an illiterate. The guy bucking the wheeled machine had no idea he was reaping Hearst's outcries, '29, or McCormick's eruptions in the Chicago Tribune, '32. Roosevelt, Hitler, Baby Rose Marie, Marie Dressier, Aimee Semple McPher-son, one, twice buried, forever shy. I cursed.
Crumley had to restrain me from leaping out to seize VICTORY IN EUROPE or HITLER DEAD IN BUNKER or AIMEE WALKS FROM SEA.
"Easy!" Crumley muttered.
"But look what he's doing to all that priceless stuff! Let go, dammit!"
I leaped forward to grab two or three front pages.
Roosevelt was elected on one, dead on another, reelected on the third, and then there was Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima at dawn.
"Jesus," I whispered, pressing the damned lovely things to my ribs.
Crumley picked up "l WILL RETURN," SAYS MACARTHUR. "I get your point," he admitted. "He was a bastard, but the best emperor Japan ever had."
The guy minding the grim reaping machine had stopped and was eyeing us like more trash.
Crumley and I jumped back. He plowed through toward a truck already heaped with MUSSOLINI BOMBS ETHIOPIA, JEANETTE MACDONALD MARRIES, AL JOLSON DEAD.
"Fire hazard!" he yelled.
I watched a half-hundred years of time pour into the Dumpster.
"Dry grass and newsprint, firetraps," I mused. "My God, my God, what if-"
"What if what?"
"In some future date people use newspapers, or books, to start fires?"
"They already do," said Crumley. "Winter mornings, my dad shoved newspaper under the coal in our stove and struck a match."
"Okay, but what about books?"
"No damn fool would use a book to start a fire. Wait. You got that look says you're about to write a ten-ton encyclopedia."
"No," I said. "Maybe a story with a hero who smells of kerosene."
"Some hero."
We walked over a killing field of littered days, nights, years, half a century. The papers crunched like cereal underfoot.
"Jericho," I said.
"Someone bring a trumpet here, and blow a blast?"
"A trumpet blast or a yell. There's been a lot of yelling lately. At Queen Califia's, or here, for King Tut."
"And then there's the priest. Rattigan," Crumley said. "Didn't Constance try to blow his church down? But hell, look, we're standing on Omaha Beach, Normandy, over Churchill's war rooms, holding Chamberlain's damned umbrella. You soaking it up?"
"Wading three feet deep. I wonder how it felt, that last second when old Rattigan drowned in this flood. Franco's Falangists, Hitler's youth, Stalin's Reds, Detroit's riots, Mayor La Guardia reading the Sunday funnies, what a death!"
"To hell with it. Look."
The remnant of Clarence Rattigan's burial cot was sticking up out of a cat litter of STOCK MARKET CRASHES and BANKS CLOSE. I picked up a final discard. Nijinsky danced on the theater page.
"A couple of nuts," said Crumley. "Nijinsky, and old Rattigan, who saved this review!"
"Touch your eyelids."
Crumley did so. His fingers came away wet.
"Damn," he said. "This is a graveyard. Move!"
I grabbed TOKYO SUES FOR PEACE…
And then headed for the sea.
Crumley drove me to my old beach apartment, but it was raining again, and I looked at the ocean threatening to drown us all with a storm that could knock at midnight and bring Constance, dead, and the other Rattigan, also dead, and crush my bed with rain and seaweed. Hell! I yanked Clarence Rattigan's newspapers off the wall.
Crumley drove me back to my small empty tract house, with no storm on the shore, and stashed vodka by my bed, Crumley's Elixir, and left the lights on and said he would call later that night to see if my soul was decent, and drove away.
I heard hail on the roof. Someone thumping a coffin lid. I called Maggie across a continent of rain. "Do I hear someone crying?" she said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
the sun was long gone when my phone rang.
"You know what time it is?" said Crumley.
"Ohmigod, it's night!"
"People dying takes a lot out of you. You done blubbering? I can't stand hysterical sob sisters, or bastard sons who carry Kleenex."
"Am I your bastard son?"
"Hit the shower, brush your teeth, and get the Daily News off your porch. I rang your bell, but you were lost. Did Queen Califia tell your fortune? She should have told her own."
"Is she— ?"
"I'm heading back to Bunker Hill at seven-thirty. Be out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella!"
I was out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella at seven twenty-nine. When I got in, Crumley grabbed my chin and scanned my face.
"Hey, no stormy weather!"
And we roared to Bunker Hill.
Passing Callahan and Ortega seemed different suddenly.
There were no police cars or morgue wagons.
"You know a scotch ale called Old Peculiar?" said Crumley as we pulled up to the curb. "Look at the nonevent outside Queen Califia's."
I also looked at the newspaper in my lap. Califia wasn't a headliner. She was buried near the obits.
" 'Renowned psychic, famed in silent films, dies in fall. Alma Crown, a.k.a. Queen Califia, was found on the steps of her Bunker Hill residence. Neighbors reported hearing her peacock cry. Searching, Califia fell. Her book The Chemistry of Palmistry was a 1939 bestseller. Her ashes are to be strewn in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, where, some said, she was born.' "
"Garbage," said Crumley.
We saw someone on the front porch of the Queen's house and walked up. It was a young woman in her twenties, with long dark hair and Gypsy coloring, wringing her hands, moaning, and letting tears fall, pointing her face toward the front door.
"Awful," she mourned. "Oh, awful, awful."
I opened the front door and stared in.
"No, my God, no."
Crumley came to look in at the desolation.
For the house was completely empty. All the pictures, crystal balls, tarot cards, lamps, books, records, furniture had vanished. Some mysterious van and transfer company had lugged it all away.
I walked into the small kitchen, pulled open drawers. Empty, vacuumed clean. Pantry: no spices, canned fruit. The cupboard was bare, so her poor dog had none.
In her bedroom the closet was crammed with hangers but no tent-size dressing gowns, stockings, shoes.
Crumley and I went out to stare at the young Gypsy woman's face. "I saw it all!" she cried, pointing in all directions. "They stole everything! They're all poor. Excuses! Poor! Across the street, when the police left, they knocked me down, old women, men, kids, yelling, laughing, ran in and out, carrying chairs, drapes, pictures, books. Grab this, grab that! A fiesta! One hour and it was empty. They went to that house over there! My God, the laughs. Look, my hands, the blood! You want Califia's junk? Go knock on doors! You gonna go?"
Crumley and I sat down on either side of her. Crumley took her left hand. I took her right.
"Sonsabitches," she gasped. "Sonsabitches."
"That's about it," said Crumley. "You can go home. There's nothing to guard. Nothing inside."
"She is inside. They took her body, but she's still there. I'll wait until she says go."
We both looked over her shoulder at the screen door and some unseen massive ghost.
"How will you know when she says go?"
The Gypsy wiped her eyes. "I'll know."
"Where are you going?" said Crumley.
Because I was on the walk heading across the street. At the opposite house I knocked.
Silence. I knocked again.
I peered through a side window. I could see shapes of furniture in midfloor, where there should be no furniture, and too many lamps, and rolled carpets.
I kicked the door and cursed and went to the middle of the street and was about to yell at every door when the Gypsy girl came quietly to touch my arm.
"I can go now," she said.
"Califia?"
"Said okay."
"Where to?" Crumley nodded at his car.
She could not stop staring at Califia's home, the center of all California.
"I have friends near the Red Rooster Plaza. Could you-"
"I could," said Crumley.
The Gypsy looked back at the vanishing palace of a queen.
"I will be back tomorrow," she called.
"She knows you will," I said.
We passed Callahan and Ortega, but this time Crumley ignored it.
We were quiet on the way to the plaza named for a rooster of a certain color.
We dropped the Gypsy.
"My God," I said on the way back, "it's like a friend, years ago, died, and the immigrants from Cuernavaca poured in, grabbed his collection of old 1900 phonographs, Caruso records, Mexican masks. Left his place like the Egyptian tombs, empty."
"That's what it's like to be poor," said Crumley.
"I grew up poor. I never stole."
"Maybe you never had a real chance."
We passed Queen Califia's place a final time.
"She's in there, all right. The Gypsy was right."
"She was right. But you're nuts."
"All this," I said. "It's too much. Too much. Constance hands me two wrong-number phone books and flees. We almost drown in twenty thousand leagues of old newspapers. Now, a dead queen. Makes me wonder, is Father Rattigan okay?"
Crumley swerved the car to the curb near a phone booth.
"Here's a dime!"
In the phone booth I dialed the cathedral.
"Is Mister…" I blushed. "Father Rattigan… is he all right?"
"All right? He's at confession!"
"Good," I said foolishly, "as long as the one he's confessing is okay."
"Nobody," said the voice, "is ever okay!"
I heard a click. I dragged myself back to the car. Crumley eyed me like a dog's dinner. "Well?"
"He's alive. Where are we going?"
"Who knows. From here on, this trip is a retreat. You know Catholic retreats? Long silent weekends. Shut la trap. Okay?"
We drove to Venice City Hall. Crumley got out and slammed his door.
He was gone half an hour. When he returned he stuck his head in the driver's-side window and said, "Now hear this, I just took a week's sick leave. And, Jesus, this is sick. We got one week to find Constance, shield St. Vibiana's priest, raise the Lazarus dead, and warn your wife to stop me from strangling you. Nod your head yes."
I nodded.
"Next twenty-four hours you don't speak without permission! Now where are those goddamn phone books?"
I handed him the Books of the Dead.
Crumley, behind the wheel, scowled at them.
"Say one last thing and shut up!"
"You're still my pal!" I blurted.
"Pity," he said, and banged the gas.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
we went back to Rattigan's and stood down on the shoreline. It was early evening and her lights were still full on; the place was like a full moon and a rising sun of architecture. Gershwin was still manhandling Manhattan one moment, Paris the next.
"I bet they buried him in his piano," said Crumley.
We got out the one Book of the Dead, Rattigan's personal phone pals, mostly cold and buried, and repeated what we had done before. Went through it page by page, with a growing sense of mortality.
On page 30 we came to the Rs.
There it was: Clarence Rattigan's dead phone and a red Christian cross over his name.
"Damn. Now let's check Califia again."
We riffled back and there it was, with big red lines under her name and a crucifix.
"That means-?"
"Whoever planted this book with Constance marked all the names with red ink and a cross, handed it over, and then killed the first two victims. Maybe. I'm running half-empty."
"Or, hoping Constance would see the red ink crucifixes, before they were killed, panic on that night she came running, and destroy them inadvertently with her shouts. Christ! Let's check the other red lines and crosses. Check St. Vibiana's."
Crumley turned the pages and exhaled. "Red crucifix."
"But Father Rattigan's still alive!" I said. "Hell!"
I trudged up the sand to Rattigan's poolside phone. I dialed St. Vibiana's.
"Who's this?" a sharp voice answered.
"Father Rattigan! Thank God!"
"For what?"
"This is Constance's friend. The idiot."
"Dammit!" the priest cried.
"Don't take any more confessions tonight!"
"You giving orders?"
"Father, you're alive! I mean, well, is there anything we can do to protect you, or-"
"No, no!" the voice cried. "Go to that other heathen church! That Jack and the Beanstalk place!"
The telephone slammed.
I looked at Crumley, he looked at me.
"Look under Grauman's," I said.
Crumley looked. "Chinese, yeah. And Grauman's name. And a red circle and a crucifix. But he died years ago!"
"Yeah, but part of Constance is buried there, or written there in cement. I'll show you. Last chance to see Jack and the Beanstalk*."
"If we time it," said Crumley, "the film will be over."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
we didn't have to time it right.
When Crumley dropped me in front of the Other Church, the great loud boisterous romantic tearstained celluloid cathedral… There was a sign on the red Chinese front door, CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS, and some workmen moving in and out. A few people were in the forecourt, fitting their shoes in the footprints.
Crumley dropped me and vamoosed.
I turned to look at the great pagoda facade. Ten percent Chinese, ninety percent Grauman's. Little Sid's.
He was, some said, knee-high to a midget, the eighth Dwarf Cinema Munchkin, all four feet bursting with film clips, sound tracks, Kong shrieking on the Empire State, Colman in Shangri-la, friend to Garbo, Dietrich, and Hepburn, haberdasher to Chaplin, golf buddy to Laurel and Hardy, keeper of the flame, recollector of ten thousand Pasts… Sid, pourer of cement, imprinter of fair and flat feet, begging and getting pavement autographs.
And there I stood on a lava flow of signatures of ghosts who had abandoned their shoe sizes.
I watched the tourists quietly testing their feet in the vast spread of cement prints, laughing softly.
What a church, I thought. More worshipers here than at St. Vibiana's.
"Rattigan," I whispered. "Are you here?"
CHAPTER TWENTY
IT was said that Constance Rattigan had the smallest tootsies in all Hollywood, perhaps in the whole world. She had her shoes cobbled in Rome, and airmailed to her twice a year because her old ones were melted from champagne poured by crazed suitors. Small feet, dainty toes, tiny shoes.
Her imprints left in Grauman's cement the night of August 22, 1929, proved this. Girls testing their size found their feet to be titanic and pitiful and abandoned her prints in despair.
So here I was alone on a strange night in Grauman's forecourt, the only place in dead, unburied Hollywood where shoppers brought dreams for refunds.
The crowd cleared. I saw her footprints some twenty feet away. I froze.
Because a small man in a black trench coat, a snap-brim hat yanked over his brow, had just tucked his shoes in Rat-tigan's footprints.
"Jesus God," I gasped. "They fit!"
The small man gazed at his tiny shoes. For the first time in forty years, Rattigan's tracks were occupied.
"Constance," I whispered.
The small man's shoulders shrank.
"Right behind you," I whispered.
"Are you one of them?" I heard a voice say from under the large dark hat.
"One of what?" I said.
"Are you Death chasing me?"
"Just a friend trying to keep up."
"I've been waiting for you," the voice said, not moving, the feet planted firmly in the footprints of Constance Rattigan.
"What's it mean?" I said. "Why this wild goose chase? Are you scared or playing tricks?"
"Why would you say that?" the voice said, hidden.
"Good grief," I said. "Is this all some cheap dodge? Someone said you might want to write your life and needed someone to help. If you expect that to be me, no thanks. I've got better things to do."
"What's better than me?" said the voice, growing smaller.
"No one, but is Death really after you or are you looking for a new life, God knows what kind?"
"What better than Uncle Sid's concrete mortuary? All the names with nothing beneath. Ask away."
"Are you going to turn and face me?"
"I couldn't talk then."
"Is this some way of getting me to help you uncover your past? Is the casket half-full or half-empty? Did someone else make those red marks in your Book of the Dead, or did you make them?"
"It had to be someone else. Or else why would I be so frightened? Those red ink marks? I've got to look them up, find which ones are dead already, and which are just about to die but still alive. Do you ever have the feeling everything's falling apart?"
"Not you, Constance."
"Christ, yes! Some nights I sleep Clara Bow, wake up Noah, wet with vodka. Is my face ruined?"
"A lovely ruin."
"But still-"
Rattigan stared out at Hollywood Boulevard. "Once there were real tourists. Now it's torn shirts. Everything's lost, junior. Venice pier drowned, trolley tracks sunk. Hollywood and Vine, was it ever there?"
"Once. When the Brown Derby hung their walls with cartoons of Gable and Dietrich, and the headwaiters were Russian princes. Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck drove by in their roadster. Hollywood and Vine? You planted your feet there and knew pure joy."
"You talk nice. Want to know where Mama's been?"
She moved her arm. She took some newspaper clippings from beneath her coat. I saw the names Califia and Mount Lowe.
"I was there, Constance," I said. "The old man was crushed by a collapsed haystack of news. God, it looked like he died on the San Andreas fault. Someone pushed the stacks, I think. An indecent burial. And Queen Califia? A fall downstairs. And your brother, the priest. Did you visit all three, Constance?"
"Whatta you see?"
"Nothing. Zero. Zilch."
"Gimme." Crumley grabbed and used one eye on the news, one on the road. It was starting to rain.
" 'Emily Starr, dead at twenty-five,' " he read.
"Watch it!" I cried as the car drifted.
He scanned another paper. " 'Corinne Kelly divorces Von Sternberg.' "
He hurled the paper over his shoulder.
" 'Rebecca Standish in hospital. Fading fast.' "
Another toss, another paper. " 'Genevieve Carlos marries Goldwyn's son.' So?"
I handed him three more between flashes of rain. They all went into the backseat.
"He said he wasn't crackers. Well?"
I shuffled the news. "We're missing something. He wouldn't keep these for the hell of it."
"No? Nuts collect peaches, plums collect nuts. Fruit salad."
"Why would Constance-" I stopped. "Hold on."
"I'm holding." Crumley clenched the wheel.
"Inside, society page. Big picture. Constance, good Lord, twenty years younger, and the mummy, that guy up there, younger, with more flesh, not bad looking, their wedding, and on one side Louis B. Mayer's assistant, Marty Krebs, and on the other, Carlotta Q. Califia, noted astrologer!"
"Who told Constance to marry up on Mount Lowe. Astrologer forecasts, Constance takes the dive. Find the obituary page."
"Obit— ?"
"Find it! Whatta you see?"
"Holy cow! The daily horoscope and the name-Queen Califia!"
"What's the forecast? Fair? Mild? Good day to start a garden or marry a sucker? Read it!"
" 'Happy week, happy day. Accept all proposals, large or small.' So, what's next?"
"We got to find Califia."
"Why?"
"Don't forget-she's got a red circle around her name, too. We got to see her before something awful happens. That red crucifix means death and burial. Yes?"
"No," said Crumley. "Old Tutankhamen up on Mount Lowe is still flopping around, and his name's red-inked, too, with a crucifix!"
"But he feels someone's coming to get him."
"Who, Constance? That knee-high wonder?"
"All right, the old man's alive. But that doesn't mean Califia hasn't already been wiped out. Old Rattigan didn't give us much. Maybe she can give us more. All we need is an address."
"That's all? Hey." Crumley suddenly swerved to the curb and got out. "Most people never think, Constance didn't think, we didn't think. One place we never looked. The Yellow Pages! What a goof! The Yellow Pages!"
He was across the sidewalk and into a public phone booth to scrabble through some beat-up Yellow Pages, tear out a page, and tote it back. "Old phone number, useless. But maybe a half-ass address."
He shoved the page in my face. I read: QUEEN CALIFIA. Palmistry. Phrenology. Astrology. Egyptian Necrology. Your life is mine. Welcome.
And the damned zodiac street locale.
"So!" said Crumley, as close to hyperventilation as he ever got. "Constance tipped us to the Egyptian relic and the relic names Califia who said marry the beast!"
"We don't know that!"
"Like hell we don't. Let's see."
He put the car in gear and we went fast, to see.
CHAPTER TWELVE
we drove up near Queen Califia's Psychic Research Lodge, dead center of Bunker Hill. Crumley gave it a sour eye. Then I nodded to one side and he saw what to him was a lovely sight: CALLAHAN AND ORTEGA FUNERAL PARLOR.
That raised his spirits. "It's like a homecoming," he admitted.
Our jalopy stopped. I got out.
"You coming in?" I said.
Crumley sat staring out the windshield, hands on the steering wheel, as if we were still moving. "How come," he said, "everything seems downhill with us?"
"You coming in? I need you."
"Outta the way."
He was halfway up the steep concrete steps and then the cracked cement walk before he stopped, surveyed the big white dilapidated bird cage of a house, and said, "Looks like the half bakery where they bake your misfortune cookies."
We continued up the walk. On the way we met a cat, a white goat, and a peacock. The peacock flirted its thousand eyes, watching us pass. We made it to the front door. When I knocked, an unseasonable blizzard of paint snowflakes rained on my shoes.
"If that's what holds this joint up, it won't be long," observed Crumley.
I rapped on the door with my knuckles. Inside I heard what sounded like a massive portable safe being trundled across a hardwood floor. Something heavy was shoved up against the other side of the door.
I raised my hand again, but a high sparrow voice inside cried, "Go away!"
"I just want-"
“Go away!”
"Five minutes," I said. "Four, two, one, for God's sake. I need your help."
"No," the voice shrilled, "I need yours."
My mind spun like a Rolodex. I heard the mummy. I echoed him.
"You ever wonder where the name California came from?" I said.
Silence. The high voice lowered to almost a whisper. "Damn."
Three sets of locks rattled.
"Nobody knows that about California. Nobody."
The door opened a few inches.
"Okay, give," the voice said.
A hand like a great plump starfish thrust out.
"Put it there!"
I put my hand in hers.
"Turn it over."
I turned it, palm up.
Her hand seized it.
"Calmness."
Her hand massaged mine; her thumb circumnavigated the lines on my palm.
"Can't be," she whispered.
More quiet motions as she thumbed the pads under my fingers.
"Is," she sighed.
And then, "You remember being born!"
"How did you know that?"
"You must be the seventh son of a seventh son!"
"No," I said, "just me, no brothers."
"My God." Her hand jumped in mine. "You're going to live forever!"
"No one does."
" You will. Not your body. But what you do. What do you do?"
"I thought my life was in your hands."
She let out a breathless laugh.
"Jesus. An actor? No. Shakespeare's bastard son."
"He had no sons."
"Melville, then. Herman Melville's by-blow."
"Wish it were true."
"Is."
I heard the great weight behind the door roll back on creaking wheels. The portal drifted wide.
I saw an immense woman in an immense crimson velvet queen's robe receding on roller wheels in a metal throne across the hardwood floor to the far side of the room. She stopped by a table on which rested not one, but four crystal balls, coruscant with light from a green-and-amber Tiffany lamp. Queen Califia, astrologer, palmist, phrenologist, past and futurist, sank inside three hundred mountainous pounds of too-too-solid flesh, her stare flashing X rays. A vast iron safe hulked in the shadows.
"I don't bite."
I stepped in. Crumley followed.
"But leave the door open," she added.
I heard the peacock scream in the yard and dared to hold out my other hand.
Queen Califia reared back as if burned.
"You know Greene, the novelist?" she gasped. "Graham Greene?"
I nodded.
"Wrote about a priest who lost faith. Then witnessed a miracle he himself had caused. The shock at his renewed faith almost killed him."
"So?"
"So." She stared at my hand as if it were disconnected from my arm. "Lord."
"Is it happening to you?" I said. "What happened to that priest?"
"Oh, God!"
"Did you lose your faith, your power to heal?"
"Yes," she murmured.
"And now, just now, it all came back?"
"Dammit! Yes!"
I crushed my hand to my chest to blind it.
"How'd you guess that?" I said.
"No guess. Scares the hell out of me."
She saw the wedding invitation and the newspaper in my outstretched hand.
"You've been up to see him," she said.
"You looked. That's cheating."
That brought a half smile and then a snort. "People ricochet off him and end up here."
"Not often enough, I think. May I sit?" I said. "I'll fall if I don't."
She nodded at a chair a few feet away, a safe distance. I fell into it.
Crumley, ignored, looked peevish.
"You were saying?" I said. "People don't visit old Rattigan often. No one knows he's alive on Mount Lowe. But someone went there and yelled at him today."
"She yelled?" The great mountain almost melted in remembrance, "I wouldn't let her in."
"Her?"
"It's always a mistake"-Queen Califia cast a glance toward the crystal balls-"to guess futures and, damn fool, tell them. I give hints, not facts. I won't tell people what stocks to buy, what flesh to borrow. Diets, yes, I sell vitamins, Chinese herbs, but not longevity."
"You just did."
"You're different." She leaned. The rollers under her massive chair squealed.
"The future lies ahead of you. I've never seen a future so clear. But you are in terrible danger. I see all the time that you have to live, but someone could destroy it. Be careful!"
She paused for a long moment, closed her eyes, and then said, "You her friend? You know who I mean."
I said, "Yes-and no."
"Everyone says that. She's black and white and wild all over.”
"Who are we talking about?"
"We don't need names. I wouldn't let her in. An hour ago." I looked at Crumley. "We're catching up, getting close." "Don't," said Califia. "The way she yelled I thought she might have a knife. Til never forgive you!' she screamed. 'You gave us the wrong road maps, down instead of up, lost instead of found. May you roast in hell!' Then I heard her drive away. I won't sleep at all tonight."
"Did she say-this sounds crazy-where she was going?" "Not crazy at all," said Califia. "I would think that since she went first to that old fool on Mount Lowe who she dropped after one bad night, then me who put her up to it, well, next, why not the poor sap who performed the ceremony? She wants to get us all together, to push us off a cliff!"
"She wouldn't do that."
"How would you know? How many women you had in your life?"
At last I said, sheepishly, "One."
Queen Califia mopped her face with a handkerchief big enough to cover half her bosom, regained her composure, and slowly advanced on me, propelling herself on glider wheels with dainty pushes of her incredibly small shoes. I could not take my eyes off how tiny her feet were compared with the vast territory above, and the great lunar face that loomed on that expanse. I saw the ghost of Constance drowned beneath that flesh. Queen Califia shut her eyes.
"She's using you. You love her?"
"Carefully."
"Keep your clothes on and your motor running. She ask you to get her with child?"
"Not in so many words."
"No words, just bastard stillborns. She whelped monsters down the whole L.A. basin, lousy Hollywood Boulevard, dead-end Main. Burn her bed, scatter the ashes, call a priest."
"Which priest, where?"
"I'll put you in touch. Now…" She paused, refusing to spit out the name. "Our friend. She's always missing. One of her dodges, to make men panic. One hour with her does it. They riot in the streets. You know the game Uncle Wig-gily? Well, Uncle Wiggily says jump back ten hops, head for the Hen House, quit!"
"But she needs me!"
"No. She dines on spoilage. Blessed are the wicked who relish wickedness. Your bones will knead her bread. If she were here, I'd run her down with my chair. God, she made Rome's ruins. Hell," she added. "Let me see your palm again." Her massive chair creaked. Her wall of flesh threatened.
"You going to take back what you saw in my hand?"
"No. I just say what I see in an open palm. You will have another life beyond this! Tear up that newspaper. Burn the wedding invitation. Leave town. Tell her to die. But tell her cross-country by phone. Now, out!"
"Where do I go from here?"
"God forgive me." She shut her eyes and whispered, "Check that wedding invitation."
I raised the invite and stared.
"Seamus Brian Joseph Rattigan, St. Vibiana's Cathedral, celebrant."
"Go tell 'im his sister is in two kinds of hell, and to send holy water. Scram! I got lots to do."
"Like what?"
"Throw up," she said.
I clutched Father Seamus Brian Joseph Rattigan in my sweaty palm, backed off, and bumped into Crumley.
"Who are you?. " said Califia, finally noticing my shadow.
"I thought you knew," Crumley said.
We went out and shut the door.
The whole house shifted with her weight.
"Warn her," Califia cried. "Tell her, don't come back."
I looked at Crumley. "She didn't tell your future!"
"Thank the Lord," said Crumley, "for small blessings."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BACK down the steep cement steps we went, and under the pale moonlight by the car, Crumley peered into my face. "What's that mad-dog look?"
"I've just joined a church!"
"Get in, for Christ's sake!"
I got in, running a fever.
"Where to?"
"St. Vibiana's Cathedral."
"Holy mackerel!"
He banged the starter.
"No." I exhaled. "I couldn't stand another face-on. Home, James, a shower, three beers, and to bed. We'll catch Constance at dawn."
We passed Callahan and Ortega, nice and slow. Crumley looked almost happy.
Before the shower, the beers, and the snooze, I pasted seven or eight newsprint front pages on the wall over my bed, where I might wake in the night in hopes of solutions.
All the names, all the pictures, all the headlines big and small saved for mysterious or not mysterious reasons.
Behind me," Crumley snorted. "Horse apples! You going to commune with news that was dead as soon as it was printed?"
"By dawn, sure, they just might drop off the wall, slide under my eyelids, and get stuck in the creative adhesive in my brain."
"Creative adhesive! Japanese bushido! American bull! Once those things are off the wall, like you, do they propagate?"
"Why not? If you don't put in, you never get out."
"Wait while I kill this." Crumley drank. "Lie down with porcupines, get up with pandas?" He nodded at all those pictures, names, and lives. "Constance in there somewhere?"
"Hidden."
"Hit the shower. I'll stand guard on the obituaries. If they move, I'll yell. How does a margarita strike you as nightcap.”
"I thought you'd never ask," I said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
st. Vibiana's Cathedral awaited us. Downtown L.A. Skid Row. At noon, heading east, we stayed off the main boulevards.
"Ever seen W. C. Fields in If I Had a Million? Bought some old tin lizzies and rammed road hogs. Super," said Crumley. "That's why I hate highways. I want to roadkill. You listening?"
"Rattigan," I said. "I thought I knew her." "Hell." Crumley laughed gently. "You don't know anyone. You'll never write the great American novel, because you don't know shoats from shinola. You overestimate character where there is none, so you upchuck fairy princes, virgin milkmaids. Most writers can't even do that, so you go with your taffy pulls, thirteen to the dozen. Let those realists scoop dog doo."
I remained silent.
"Know what your problem is?" Crumley barked, and then softened his voice. "You love people not worth loving."
"Like you, Crum?"
He glanced over cautiously.
"Oh, I'm okay," he admitted. "I've more holes than a sieve, but I haven't fallen through. Hold on!" Crumley hit the brakes. "The pope's home away from home!"
I looked out at St. Vibiana's Cathedral in the midst of the slow-motion desolation of long-dead Skid Row.
"Jesus," I said, "would have built here. You coming in?"
"Hellfires, no! I was kicked outta confession, age twelve, when I skinned my knees on wild women."
"Will you ever take Communion again?"
"When I die. Hop out, buster. From Queen Califia to the Queen of Angels."
I climbed out.
"Say a Hail Mary for me," Crumley said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INSIDE the cathedral it was empty, just after noon, and just one penitent was waiting by the confessional when a priest arrived and beckoned her in.
His face confirmed I was in the right place.
When the woman left, I ducked in the other side of the confessional, tongue-tied.
A shadow moved in the lattice window.
"Well, my son?"
"Forgive me, Father," I blurted out. "Califia."
The other confessional door banged wide with a curse. I opened my door. The priest reared as if I had shot him.
It was Rattigan Deja Vu. Not svelte in ninety-five pounds of suntanned seal-brown flesh, but marrowed in a wire-coat-hanger skeleton-thin Florentine Renaissance priest. Constance's bones hid there, but the flesh skinned over the bones was skull pale, the priest's lips were ravenous for salvation, not bed and sinful breakfasts. Here was Savonarola begging God to forgive his wild perorations, and God silent, with Constance's ghost burning from his eyes, and peering from his skull.
Father Rattigan, riven, found me harmless save for that word, jerked his head toward the vestry, led me in, and shut the door.
"You her friend?"
"No, sir."
"Good!" He caught himself. "Sit. You have five minutes. The cardinal is waiting."
"You had better go."
"Five minutes," said Constance from inside the mask of this genetic twin. "Well?"
"I've just visited-"
"Califia." Father Rattigan exhaled with controlled despair. "The Queen. Sends people she can't help. She has her church, not mine."
"Constance has disappeared again, Father."
"Again?"
"That's what the Queen, ah, Califia said."
I held out the Book of the Dead. Father Rattigan turned its pages.
"Where'd you get this?"
"Constance. She said someone sent it to her. To scare her, maybe, or hurt her, or God knows what. I mean, only she knows if it's a real threat."
"You think she might just be hiding to spoil things for everyone?" He deliberated. "I myself am of two minds. But then there were those who burned Savonarola then and elevate him now. A most peculiar sinner-cum-saint."
"Aren't there similarities, Father?" I dared to say. "Lots of sinners became saints, yes?"
"What do you know about Florence in 1492 when Savonarola made Botticelli burn his paintings?"
"It's the only age I know, sir, Father. Then Savonarola, now Constance…"
"If Savonarola knew her, he'd kill himself. No, no, let me think. I've starved since dawn. Here's bread and wine. Let's have some before I fall."
The good father pulled a loaf and a jug out of the vestry closet, and we sat. Father Rattigan broke the bread, then poured a small wine for himself, and a large for me, which I took gladly.
"Baptist?" he said.
"How did you guess?"
"I'd rather not say."
I tipped back my glass. "Can you help me with Constance, Father?"
"No. Oh, Lord, Lord, maybe."
He refilled my glass.
"Last night. Can it be? I stayed in the confessional late. I felt… as if I were waiting for someone. Finally, near midnight, a woman entered the confessional and for a long while was silent. Finally, like Jesus calling Lazarus, I insisted, and she wept. It all came out. Sins by the pound and the truckload, sins from last year, ten years, thirty years past, she couldn't stop, on and on, night on dreadful night, on and on, and finally she was still and I was about to instruct her with Hail Marys when I heard her running. I checked the other side of the confessional but only smelled perfume. Oh Lord, Lord."
"Your sister's scent?"
"Constance?" Father Rattigan sank back. "Hell burned twice, that perfume."
Last night, I thought. So close. If Crumley and I had only come then.
"You'd better go, Father," I said.
"The cardinal will wait."
"Well," I said, "if she returns, would you call me?"
"No," said the priest. "The confessional's as private as a lawyer's office. Are you that upset?"
"Yes." I twisted the wedding ring on my finger, absently.
Father Rattigan noticed.
"Does your wife know all this?"
"Approximately."
"That sounds like delicatessen morality."
"My wife trusts me."
"Wives do that, God bless them. Does my sister seem worth saving?"
"Doesn't she to you?"
"Dear God, I gave up when she claimed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was a Kama Sutra pose."
"Constance! Still, Father, if she shows up again, could you call my number and hang up? I'd know you were signaling her arrival."
"You do know how to split hairs. Give me your number. I see in you not so much a Baptist but a fair Christian."
I gave him my number as well as Crumley's.
"Just one ring, Father."
The priest studied the numbers. "We all live on the slope. But some, by a miracle, grow roots. Don't wait. Your phone may never ring. But I'll give your number to my assistant, Betty Kelly, too, just in case. Why are you doing this?"
"She was heading fast off a cliff."
"Watch out she doesn't take you with. I'm ashamed I said that. But as a child she skated out and stopped in mid-traffic to laugh."
He fixed me with a bright needle eye. "But why do I tell you this?"
"It's my face."
"Your what?"
"My face. I look in mirrors but never catch myself. The expression always changes before I can trap it. It's got to be a blend of the Boy Jesus and Genghis Khan. It drives my friends crazy."
This relaxed some of the priest's bones. "Does idiot savant sound right?"
"Almost. The school bullies took one look and beat the hell out of me. You were saying?"
"Was I? Yes, well, if that screaming woman was Constance, and her voice seemed different, she gave me orders. Imagine, orders to a priest! Gave me a deadline. Said she'd be back in twenty-four hours. I must give complete forgiveness for all her sins, twenty thousand strong. As if I could assign such mass-market absolution. I told her she must forgive herself, and ask others for forgiveness. God loves you. 'But He doesn't,' she said. And then she was gone."
" Will she come back?"
"With doves on her shoulders or lightning bolts."
Father Rattigan walked me to the front of the cathedral. "And how does she look? Like a siren singing to lure damned sailors to drown. Are you a poor damn sailor?"
"No, just someone who writes people on Mars, Father."
"I hope they are happier than we are. Wait! Good Lord, there was a thing she said. That she was joining a new church. And might not come back to douse my ears."
"What church, Father?"
"Chinese. Chinese and Grauman's. Some church!"
"To many it is. You've been there?"
"To see King of Kings, I found the forecourt superior to the film. You look as if you're about to break and run."
"To the new church, Father. Chinese. Grauman's."
"Stay off the quicksand footprints. Many sinners have sunk there. What film's playing?"
"Abbott and Costello in Jack and the Beanstalk?
"Lamentable."
"Lamentable." I ran.
"Mind the quicksand!" Father Rattigan called after me as I raced out the doors.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
on the way across town I was a hot-air balloon full of Great Expectations. Crumley kept hitting my elbow to make me calm down, calm down. But we had to get to that other church.
"Church!" Crumley muttered. "Since when do double features sideline the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?"
"King Kong! That's when! 1932! Fay Wray kissed my cheek."
"Holy mackerel." Crumley switched on the car radio.
"— afternoon-" a voice said. "Mount Lowe-"
"Listen!" I said, my stomach a chunk of ice.
The voice said, "Death… police… Clarence Rattigan… victim…" A flare of static. "Freak accident… victim smothered, smothered… old newspapers. Recall brothers in Bronx? Saved stacks of old papers that fell and killed the brothers? Newspapers…"
"Turn it off."
Crumley turned it off.
"That poor lost soul," I said.
"Was he really that lost?"
"Lost as you can get without giving it the old heave-ho."
"You want to drive by?"
"Drive by," I said at last, making noises.
"You didn't know him," said Crumley. "Why those noises?"
The last police car was leaving. The morgue van had long since left. A lone policeman on his motorcycle stood at the bottom of Mount Lowe. Crumley leaned out his window.
"Anything to keep us from driving up?"
"Just me," said the officer. "But I'm leaving."
"Were there any reporters?"
"No, it wasn't worth it."
"Yeah," I said, and made more noises.
"Okay, okay," Crumley groused, "wait till I get this damn car aimed before you upchuck your hairball."
I waited and fell apart, silently.
The motorcycle policeman left, and it was a long late afternoon journey up to the ruined temple of Karnak, the destroyed Valley of the Kings, and lost Cairo, or so I said along the way.
"Lord Carnarvon dug up a king, we bury one. I wouldn't mind a grave like this."
"Bull Montana," said Crumley. "He was a wrestling cowboy. Bull."
At the top of the hill there were no ruins, just a vast pyramid of newspapers being rummaged by a bulldozer driven by an illiterate. The guy bucking the wheeled machine had no idea he was reaping Hearst's outcries, '29, or McCormick's eruptions in the Chicago Tribune, '32. Roosevelt, Hitler, Baby Rose Marie, Marie Dressier, Aimee Semple McPher-son, one, twice buried, forever shy. I cursed.
Crumley had to restrain me from leaping out to seize VICTORY IN EUROPE or HITLER DEAD IN BUNKER or AIMEE WALKS FROM SEA.
"Easy!" Crumley muttered.
"But look what he's doing to all that priceless stuff! Let go, dammit!"
I leaped forward to grab two or three front pages.
Roosevelt was elected on one, dead on another, reelected on the third, and then there was Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima at dawn.
"Jesus," I whispered, pressing the damned lovely things to my ribs.
Crumley picked up "l WILL RETURN," SAYS MACARTHUR. "I get your point," he admitted. "He was a bastard, but the best emperor Japan ever had."
The guy minding the grim reaping machine had stopped and was eyeing us like more trash.
Crumley and I jumped back. He plowed through toward a truck already heaped with MUSSOLINI BOMBS ETHIOPIA, JEANETTE MACDONALD MARRIES, AL JOLSON DEAD.
"Fire hazard!" he yelled.
I watched a half-hundred years of time pour into the Dumpster.
"Dry grass and newsprint, firetraps," I mused. "My God, my God, what if-"
"What if what?"
"In some future date people use newspapers, or books, to start fires?"
"They already do," said Crumley. "Winter mornings, my dad shoved newspaper under the coal in our stove and struck a match."
"Okay, but what about books?"
"No damn fool would use a book to start a fire. Wait. You got that look says you're about to write a ten-ton encyclopedia."
"No," I said. "Maybe a story with a hero who smells of kerosene."
"Some hero."
We walked over a killing field of littered days, nights, years, half a century. The papers crunched like cereal underfoot.
"Jericho," I said.
"Someone bring a trumpet here, and blow a blast?"
"A trumpet blast or a yell. There's been a lot of yelling lately. At Queen Califia's, or here, for King Tut."
"And then there's the priest. Rattigan," Crumley said. "Didn't Constance try to blow his church down? But hell, look, we're standing on Omaha Beach, Normandy, over Churchill's war rooms, holding Chamberlain's damned umbrella. You soaking it up?"
"Wading three feet deep. I wonder how it felt, that last second when old Rattigan drowned in this flood. Franco's Falangists, Hitler's youth, Stalin's Reds, Detroit's riots, Mayor La Guardia reading the Sunday funnies, what a death!"
"To hell with it. Look."
The remnant of Clarence Rattigan's burial cot was sticking up out of a cat litter of STOCK MARKET CRASHES and BANKS CLOSE. I picked up a final discard. Nijinsky danced on the theater page.
"A couple of nuts," said Crumley. "Nijinsky, and old Rattigan, who saved this review!"
"Touch your eyelids."
Crumley did so. His fingers came away wet.
"Damn," he said. "This is a graveyard. Move!"
I grabbed TOKYO SUES FOR PEACE…
And then headed for the sea.
Crumley drove me to my old beach apartment, but it was raining again, and I looked at the ocean threatening to drown us all with a storm that could knock at midnight and bring Constance, dead, and the other Rattigan, also dead, and crush my bed with rain and seaweed. Hell! I yanked Clarence Rattigan's newspapers off the wall.
Crumley drove me back to my small empty tract house, with no storm on the shore, and stashed vodka by my bed, Crumley's Elixir, and left the lights on and said he would call later that night to see if my soul was decent, and drove away.
I heard hail on the roof. Someone thumping a coffin lid. I called Maggie across a continent of rain. "Do I hear someone crying?" she said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
the sun was long gone when my phone rang.
"You know what time it is?" said Crumley.
"Ohmigod, it's night!"
"People dying takes a lot out of you. You done blubbering? I can't stand hysterical sob sisters, or bastard sons who carry Kleenex."
"Am I your bastard son?"
"Hit the shower, brush your teeth, and get the Daily News off your porch. I rang your bell, but you were lost. Did Queen Califia tell your fortune? She should have told her own."
"Is she— ?"
"I'm heading back to Bunker Hill at seven-thirty. Be out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella!"
I was out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella at seven twenty-nine. When I got in, Crumley grabbed my chin and scanned my face.
"Hey, no stormy weather!"
And we roared to Bunker Hill.
Passing Callahan and Ortega seemed different suddenly.
There were no police cars or morgue wagons.
"You know a scotch ale called Old Peculiar?" said Crumley as we pulled up to the curb. "Look at the nonevent outside Queen Califia's."
I also looked at the newspaper in my lap. Califia wasn't a headliner. She was buried near the obits.
" 'Renowned psychic, famed in silent films, dies in fall. Alma Crown, a.k.a. Queen Califia, was found on the steps of her Bunker Hill residence. Neighbors reported hearing her peacock cry. Searching, Califia fell. Her book The Chemistry of Palmistry was a 1939 bestseller. Her ashes are to be strewn in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, where, some said, she was born.' "
"Garbage," said Crumley.
We saw someone on the front porch of the Queen's house and walked up. It was a young woman in her twenties, with long dark hair and Gypsy coloring, wringing her hands, moaning, and letting tears fall, pointing her face toward the front door.
"Awful," she mourned. "Oh, awful, awful."
I opened the front door and stared in.
"No, my God, no."
Crumley came to look in at the desolation.
For the house was completely empty. All the pictures, crystal balls, tarot cards, lamps, books, records, furniture had vanished. Some mysterious van and transfer company had lugged it all away.
I walked into the small kitchen, pulled open drawers. Empty, vacuumed clean. Pantry: no spices, canned fruit. The cupboard was bare, so her poor dog had none.
In her bedroom the closet was crammed with hangers but no tent-size dressing gowns, stockings, shoes.
Crumley and I went out to stare at the young Gypsy woman's face. "I saw it all!" she cried, pointing in all directions. "They stole everything! They're all poor. Excuses! Poor! Across the street, when the police left, they knocked me down, old women, men, kids, yelling, laughing, ran in and out, carrying chairs, drapes, pictures, books. Grab this, grab that! A fiesta! One hour and it was empty. They went to that house over there! My God, the laughs. Look, my hands, the blood! You want Califia's junk? Go knock on doors! You gonna go?"
Crumley and I sat down on either side of her. Crumley took her left hand. I took her right.
"Sonsabitches," she gasped. "Sonsabitches."
"That's about it," said Crumley. "You can go home. There's nothing to guard. Nothing inside."
"She is inside. They took her body, but she's still there. I'll wait until she says go."
We both looked over her shoulder at the screen door and some unseen massive ghost.
"How will you know when she says go?"
The Gypsy wiped her eyes. "I'll know."
"Where are you going?" said Crumley.
Because I was on the walk heading across the street. At the opposite house I knocked.
Silence. I knocked again.
I peered through a side window. I could see shapes of furniture in midfloor, where there should be no furniture, and too many lamps, and rolled carpets.
I kicked the door and cursed and went to the middle of the street and was about to yell at every door when the Gypsy girl came quietly to touch my arm.
"I can go now," she said.
"Califia?"
"Said okay."
"Where to?" Crumley nodded at his car.
She could not stop staring at Califia's home, the center of all California.
"I have friends near the Red Rooster Plaza. Could you-"
"I could," said Crumley.
The Gypsy looked back at the vanishing palace of a queen.
"I will be back tomorrow," she called.
"She knows you will," I said.
We passed Callahan and Ortega, but this time Crumley ignored it.
We were quiet on the way to the plaza named for a rooster of a certain color.
We dropped the Gypsy.
"My God," I said on the way back, "it's like a friend, years ago, died, and the immigrants from Cuernavaca poured in, grabbed his collection of old 1900 phonographs, Caruso records, Mexican masks. Left his place like the Egyptian tombs, empty."
"That's what it's like to be poor," said Crumley.
"I grew up poor. I never stole."
"Maybe you never had a real chance."
We passed Queen Califia's place a final time.
"She's in there, all right. The Gypsy was right."
"She was right. But you're nuts."
"All this," I said. "It's too much. Too much. Constance hands me two wrong-number phone books and flees. We almost drown in twenty thousand leagues of old newspapers. Now, a dead queen. Makes me wonder, is Father Rattigan okay?"
Crumley swerved the car to the curb near a phone booth.
"Here's a dime!"
In the phone booth I dialed the cathedral.
"Is Mister…" I blushed. "Father Rattigan… is he all right?"
"All right? He's at confession!"
"Good," I said foolishly, "as long as the one he's confessing is okay."
"Nobody," said the voice, "is ever okay!"
I heard a click. I dragged myself back to the car. Crumley eyed me like a dog's dinner. "Well?"
"He's alive. Where are we going?"
"Who knows. From here on, this trip is a retreat. You know Catholic retreats? Long silent weekends. Shut la trap. Okay?"
We drove to Venice City Hall. Crumley got out and slammed his door.
He was gone half an hour. When he returned he stuck his head in the driver's-side window and said, "Now hear this, I just took a week's sick leave. And, Jesus, this is sick. We got one week to find Constance, shield St. Vibiana's priest, raise the Lazarus dead, and warn your wife to stop me from strangling you. Nod your head yes."
I nodded.
"Next twenty-four hours you don't speak without permission! Now where are those goddamn phone books?"
I handed him the Books of the Dead.
Crumley, behind the wheel, scowled at them.
"Say one last thing and shut up!"
"You're still my pal!" I blurted.
"Pity," he said, and banged the gas.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
we went back to Rattigan's and stood down on the shoreline. It was early evening and her lights were still full on; the place was like a full moon and a rising sun of architecture. Gershwin was still manhandling Manhattan one moment, Paris the next.
"I bet they buried him in his piano," said Crumley.
We got out the one Book of the Dead, Rattigan's personal phone pals, mostly cold and buried, and repeated what we had done before. Went through it page by page, with a growing sense of mortality.
On page 30 we came to the Rs.
There it was: Clarence Rattigan's dead phone and a red Christian cross over his name.
"Damn. Now let's check Califia again."
We riffled back and there it was, with big red lines under her name and a crucifix.
"That means-?"
"Whoever planted this book with Constance marked all the names with red ink and a cross, handed it over, and then killed the first two victims. Maybe. I'm running half-empty."
"Or, hoping Constance would see the red ink crucifixes, before they were killed, panic on that night she came running, and destroy them inadvertently with her shouts. Christ! Let's check the other red lines and crosses. Check St. Vibiana's."
Crumley turned the pages and exhaled. "Red crucifix."
"But Father Rattigan's still alive!" I said. "Hell!"
I trudged up the sand to Rattigan's poolside phone. I dialed St. Vibiana's.
"Who's this?" a sharp voice answered.
"Father Rattigan! Thank God!"
"For what?"
"This is Constance's friend. The idiot."
"Dammit!" the priest cried.
"Don't take any more confessions tonight!"
"You giving orders?"
"Father, you're alive! I mean, well, is there anything we can do to protect you, or-"
"No, no!" the voice cried. "Go to that other heathen church! That Jack and the Beanstalk place!"
The telephone slammed.
I looked at Crumley, he looked at me.
"Look under Grauman's," I said.
Crumley looked. "Chinese, yeah. And Grauman's name. And a red circle and a crucifix. But he died years ago!"
"Yeah, but part of Constance is buried there, or written there in cement. I'll show you. Last chance to see Jack and the Beanstalk*."
"If we time it," said Crumley, "the film will be over."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
we didn't have to time it right.
When Crumley dropped me in front of the Other Church, the great loud boisterous romantic tearstained celluloid cathedral… There was a sign on the red Chinese front door, CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS, and some workmen moving in and out. A few people were in the forecourt, fitting their shoes in the footprints.
Crumley dropped me and vamoosed.
I turned to look at the great pagoda facade. Ten percent Chinese, ninety percent Grauman's. Little Sid's.
He was, some said, knee-high to a midget, the eighth Dwarf Cinema Munchkin, all four feet bursting with film clips, sound tracks, Kong shrieking on the Empire State, Colman in Shangri-la, friend to Garbo, Dietrich, and Hepburn, haberdasher to Chaplin, golf buddy to Laurel and Hardy, keeper of the flame, recollector of ten thousand Pasts… Sid, pourer of cement, imprinter of fair and flat feet, begging and getting pavement autographs.
And there I stood on a lava flow of signatures of ghosts who had abandoned their shoe sizes.
I watched the tourists quietly testing their feet in the vast spread of cement prints, laughing softly.
What a church, I thought. More worshipers here than at St. Vibiana's.
"Rattigan," I whispered. "Are you here?"
CHAPTER TWENTY
IT was said that Constance Rattigan had the smallest tootsies in all Hollywood, perhaps in the whole world. She had her shoes cobbled in Rome, and airmailed to her twice a year because her old ones were melted from champagne poured by crazed suitors. Small feet, dainty toes, tiny shoes.
Her imprints left in Grauman's cement the night of August 22, 1929, proved this. Girls testing their size found their feet to be titanic and pitiful and abandoned her prints in despair.
So here I was alone on a strange night in Grauman's forecourt, the only place in dead, unburied Hollywood where shoppers brought dreams for refunds.
The crowd cleared. I saw her footprints some twenty feet away. I froze.
Because a small man in a black trench coat, a snap-brim hat yanked over his brow, had just tucked his shoes in Rat-tigan's footprints.
"Jesus God," I gasped. "They fit!"
The small man gazed at his tiny shoes. For the first time in forty years, Rattigan's tracks were occupied.
"Constance," I whispered.
The small man's shoulders shrank.
"Right behind you," I whispered.
"Are you one of them?" I heard a voice say from under the large dark hat.
"One of what?" I said.
"Are you Death chasing me?"
"Just a friend trying to keep up."
"I've been waiting for you," the voice said, not moving, the feet planted firmly in the footprints of Constance Rattigan.
"What's it mean?" I said. "Why this wild goose chase? Are you scared or playing tricks?"
"Why would you say that?" the voice said, hidden.
"Good grief," I said. "Is this all some cheap dodge? Someone said you might want to write your life and needed someone to help. If you expect that to be me, no thanks. I've got better things to do."
"What's better than me?" said the voice, growing smaller.
"No one, but is Death really after you or are you looking for a new life, God knows what kind?"
"What better than Uncle Sid's concrete mortuary? All the names with nothing beneath. Ask away."
"Are you going to turn and face me?"
"I couldn't talk then."
"Is this some way of getting me to help you uncover your past? Is the casket half-full or half-empty? Did someone else make those red marks in your Book of the Dead, or did you make them?"
"It had to be someone else. Or else why would I be so frightened? Those red ink marks? I've got to look them up, find which ones are dead already, and which are just about to die but still alive. Do you ever have the feeling everything's falling apart?"
"Not you, Constance."
"Christ, yes! Some nights I sleep Clara Bow, wake up Noah, wet with vodka. Is my face ruined?"
"A lovely ruin."
"But still-"
Rattigan stared out at Hollywood Boulevard. "Once there were real tourists. Now it's torn shirts. Everything's lost, junior. Venice pier drowned, trolley tracks sunk. Hollywood and Vine, was it ever there?"
"Once. When the Brown Derby hung their walls with cartoons of Gable and Dietrich, and the headwaiters were Russian princes. Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck drove by in their roadster. Hollywood and Vine? You planted your feet there and knew pure joy."
"You talk nice. Want to know where Mama's been?"
She moved her arm. She took some newspaper clippings from beneath her coat. I saw the names Califia and Mount Lowe.
"I was there, Constance," I said. "The old man was crushed by a collapsed haystack of news. God, it looked like he died on the San Andreas fault. Someone pushed the stacks, I think. An indecent burial. And Queen Califia? A fall downstairs. And your brother, the priest. Did you visit all three, Constance?"