Страница:
Quickly toward the end.
"But no red circles around the names. So? Are they alive or dead?"
"Why not go see," said Henry.
Lightning struck. The lights failed again.
In the dark, Henry said, "Don't tell me, let me guess."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
crumley dropped us by the old apartment house and ran.
"Now," said Henry, "what are we doing here?"
Inside, I glanced up the three-story stairwell. "Searching for Marlene Dietrich alive and well."
Before I even knocked on the door, I caught the perfume through the paneling. I sneezed and knocked.
"Dear God," a voice said. "I haven't a thing to wear."
The door opened and a billowing butterfly kimono stood there with a Victorian relic inside, squirming to make it fit. It stopped squirming and tape-measured my shoes, my knee bones, my shoulders, and finally eye to eye.
"J. Wallington Bradford?" I cleared my throat. "Mr. Bradford?"
"Who's asking?" the creature in the doorway wondered. "Jesus. Come in. Come in. And who's this other thing?"
"I'm the boy's Seeing Eye." Henry probed the air. "That a chair? Think I'll sit. Sure smells strong in here. Nothing personal."
The kimono let loose a blizzard of confetti in its lungs and waved us in with a grand sweep of its sleeve. "I hope it isn't business that brings you here. Sit, while Mama pours gin. Big or small?"
Before I could speak he had filled a big glass with clear Bombay blue crystal liquor. I sipped.
"That's a good boy," said Bradford. "You staying five minutes or the night? My God, he's blushing. Is this about Rattigan?"
"Rattigan!" I cried. "How'd you know?"
"She was here and gone. Every few years Rattigan vanishes. It's how she divorces a new husband, an old lover, God, or her astrologer. ?Quien sabe?"
I nodded, stunned.
"She came years ago, asking how I did it. All those people, she said. Constance, I said, how many cat lives have you had? A thousand? Don't ask which flue I slid up, which bed I ran under!"
"But— "
"No buts. Mother Earth knows all. Constance invented Freud, tossed in Jung and Darwin. Did you know she bedded all six studio heads? It was a bet she took at the Brown Derby from Harry Cohn. Til harvest Jack Warner and his brothers till their ears fly off,' she said.
"All in the same year? Cohn yelled.
"'Year, hell,' said Constance. 'In one week, with Sunday off!'
" 'I bet a hundred you can't!' said Cohn.
" 'Make it a thousand and you're on,' said Constance.
"Harry Cohn glared. 'What will you put up as collateral?'
" 'Me,' said Rattigan.
" 'Shake!' cried Cohn.
"She shook all over. 'Hold these!' She flung her pants in Cohn's lap and fled."
Breathless, J. W. Bradford raved on: "Did you know that once I was Judy Garland. Then Joan Crawford, then Bette Davis. I was Bankhead in Lifeboat. A real nightwalker, late sleeper, bed buster. You need help finding Rattigan? I can list her discards. Some fell in my lap. You want to say something?"
"Is there a real you in there, somewhere?" I said.
"God, I hope not. How terrible to find me in bed with just me! Rattigan. You tried her beach house? Artie Shaw stayed there after Caruso. She got him when she was thirteen. Drove him up the La Scala wall. When she topped off Lawrence Tibbett, he sang soprano. They had a squad car of paramedics by her joint, 1936, when she mouth-to-mouth breathed Thalberg into Forest Lawn. You okay?"
"I just got hit by a ten-ton safe."
"Take more gin. Tallulah says so."
"You'll help us find Constance?"
"No one else can. I loaned her my whole wardrobe a million years back. Gave her my makeup-box rejects, taught her perfumes, how to surprise her eyebrows, lift her ears, shorten her upper lip, widen her smile, flatten or bulge her bosom, walk taller than tall, or fall short. I was a mirror she posed in front of, watching me stare, blink, pretend remorse, alert, despair, delight, sing in a gilded cage, power-dive into pajamas, breaststroke out. She trotted in a high school pony, swarmed out a nest of ballerinas. By the time she left, she was someone else. That was ten thousand vaudevilles ago. And all so she could compete with other actresses for other roles in films, or maybe steal their men.
"Okay, doll," J. W. Bradford said as he scribbled on a pad. "Here's more names of those who loved Constance. Nine producers, ten directors, forty-five at-liberty actors, and a partridge in a pear tree."
"Did she never hold still?"
"Ever see those seals in Rattigan's surf? Slick as oil, quicker than quicksilver, hit the bed like lightning. Number one in the L.A. Marathon long before there was one. Could have been board chairman at three studios, but wound up as Vampira, Madame Defarge, and Dolley Madison. There!"
"Thanks." I scanned a list that would have filled the Bastille twice over.
"Now if you'll forgive, Mata Hari must change.1"
Zip! He flourished his kimono.
Zip! I grabbed Henry's arm and we flew down the stairs and out onto the street.
"Hey!" someone cried. "Wait!"
I turned and looked up. Jean Harlow-Dietrich-Colbert leaned over the top rail, smiling wildly, waiting for Von Stroheim to shoot her close-up.
"There's someone else like me, even crazier. Quickly!"
"Alberto Quickly!" I called. "He's alive?"
"He does one nightclub a week, then hospital rehabs. When they sew him up he repeats his farewell tour. Damn fool, in his nineties, said he found Constance (a lie!) on Route 66 when he was, my God, forty, fifty. Driving across country, he picked up this tomboy with suspicious breasts. Made her a star while his act faded. Runs a theatre intime in his parlor. Charges folks on Friday nights to see Caesar stabbed, Antony on his sword, Cleopatra bitten." A piece of paper sailed down. "There! And something else!"
"What?"
"Connie, Helen, Annette, Roberta. Constance didn't show up for more lessons in changing lives! Last week. She was supposed to come back and didn't."
"I don't understand," I yelled.
"I had taught her things, dark, light, loud, soft, wild, quiet, some sort of new role she was looking for. She was coming back to me to learn some more. She wanted to be a new person. Maybe like her old self. But I didn't know how to help. Role-playing, Jesus, how do you get actors unhooked? W. C. Fields learned to be W. C. Fields in vaudeville. He never escaped those handcuffs. So here was Constance saying 'Help me to find a new self.' I said, 'Constance, I don't know how to help you. Get a priest to put a new skin around you.' "
A great bell rang in my head. Priest.
"Well, that's it," said Jean Harlow. "Did I confuse but amuse? Ciao." Bradford vanished.
"Quickly," I gasped. "Let's call Crumley."
"What's the rush?" said Henry.
"No, no, Alberto Quickly, the rabbit in and out of the hat, Hamlet's father's ghost."
"Oh, him," said Henry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
we dropped Henry off at some nice soft-spoken relatives on Central Avenue and then Crumley delivered me to the home of Alberto Quickly, ninety-nine years old, Rattigan's first "teacher."
"The first," he said. "The Bertillion expert, who fingerprinted Constance toenail to elbow to knees."
In vaudeville he had been known as Mr. Metaphor, who acted all of Old Curiosity Shop or every last one of Fagin's brood in Oliver Twist as audiences cried "Mercy." He was more morbid than Marley, paler than Poe.
Quickly, the critics cried, orchestrated requiems to flood the Thames with mournful tides when, as Tosca, he flung himself into forever.
All this Metaphor-Quickly said glibly, happily, as I sat in his small theater-stage parlor. I waved away the box of Kleenex he offered before he treated me to his Lucia, mad again.
"Stop," I cried at last. "What about Constance?"
"Hardly knew her," he said, "but I did know Katy Kelle-her, 1926, my first Pygmalion child!"
"Pygmalion?" I murmured, pieces falling into place.
"Do you recall Molly Callahan, 1927?"
"Faintly."
"How about Polly Riordan, 1926?"
"Almost."
"Katy was Alice in Wonderland, Molly was Molly in Mad Molly O'Day. Polly was Polly of the Circus, same year. Katy, Molly, Polly-all Constance. A whirlwind blew in nameless, blew out famous. I taught her to shout, 'I'm Polly!' Producers cried, 'You are, you are!' The film was shot in six days. Then I revamped her to jump down Leo the Lion's throat. 'I'm Pretty Katy Kelly.' 'You are!' the lion pride yelled. Her second film done in four days! Kelly vanished, then Molly climbed the RKO radio tower. So it was Molly, Polly, Dolly, Sally, Gerty, Connie… and Constance rabbiting studio lawns!"
"No one ever guessed Constance played more than one part over the years?"
"Only I, Alberto Quickly, helped her to grab onto fame, fortune, and fondling! The golden greased pig! No one ever knew that some of the marquee names on Hollywood Boulevard were names Constance made up or borrowed. Could be she shuffled her tootsies in Grauman's forecourt with four different shoe sizes!"
"And where is Molly, Polly, Sally, Gerty, Connie, now?"
"Even she doesn't know. Here are six different addresses in twelve different summers. Maybe she drowned in deep grass. Years are a great hiding place. God hides you. Duck! What's my name?!"
He did a flip-flop cartwheel across the room. I heard his old bones scream.
"Ta— ta!" He grinned in pain.
"Mr. Metaphor!"
"You got it!" He dropped cold.
I leaned over him, terrified. He popped one eye wide.
"That was a close one. Prop me up. I scared Rattigan so, she ran." He babbled on. "It was only fitting. After all, I'm Fagin, Marley, Scrooge, Hamlet, Quickly. Someone like me had to be curious and try to figure out what year she lived in, or if she ever existed at all. The older I got, the more jealous I became of the gain and loss of Constance. I waited too long over the years, just as Hamlet waited too long to slay the foul fiend who killed his father's ghost! Ophelia and Caesar begged for slaughter. The memory of Constance summoned bull stampedes. So when I turned ninety all my voices raved for revenge. Like a damn fool I sent her the Book of the Dead. So it must be that Constance ran from my madness.
"Call an ambulance," Mr. Metaphor added. "I've got two broken tibias and a herniated groin. Did you write all that down?"
"Later."
"Don't wait! Write it. An hour from now I'll be in Valhalla harassing the statues. Where's my bed?"
I put him to bed.
"Slow down," I said. "That Book of the Dead, you say you sent that to Constance?"
"There was a half-ass semi-garage sale of actors' junk at the Film Ladies' League last month. I got some Fairbanks photos and a Crosby song sheet, and there, by God, was Rattigan's thrown-away phonebook stuffed with all her cat-litter-box lovers. My God, I was the snake in the garden. Grabbed onto damnation for a dime, eyed the lists, drank the poison. Why not give Rattigan bad dreams? Tracked her down, dropped the Dead Book, ran. Did it scare the stuffings out of her?"
"Oh, my God, it did." I stared into Mr. Quickly's grinning face. "Then you didn't have anything to do with that poor old soul lost on Mount Lowe?"
"Constance's first sucker? That stupid old guy is dead?"
"Newspapers killed him."
"Critics do that."
"No. Tons of old Tribunes fell on him."
"One way or the other, they kill."
"And you didn't harass Queen Califia?"
"That old Noah's Ark, two of every kind of lie in her. High/low, hot/cold. Camel dung and horse puckies. She told Constance where to go and she went. She dead, too?"
"Fell downstairs."
"I didn't trip her."
"Then there was the priest…"
"Her brother? Same mistake. Califia told her where to go. But he, my God, told her to go to hell. So Constance went. What killed him? God, everyone's dead!"
"She yelled at him. Or I think it was she." "You know what she yelled?"
"No."
"I do."
"You?"
"Middle of the night, last night, I heard voices, thought I was dreaming. That voice, it had to be her. Maybe what she yelled at that poor damn priest, she yelled at me. Wanna hear?"
"I'm waiting."
"Oh, yeah. She yelled, 'How do I get back, where's the next place, how do I get back?'"
"Get back to where?"
There was a quick spin of thought behind Quickly's eyelids. He snorted.
"Her brother told her where to go and she went. And at last she said, 'I'm lost, show me the way.' Constance wants to be found. That it?"
"Yes. No. God, I don't know."
"Neither does she. Maybe that's why she yelled. But my house is built of bricks. It never fell."
"Others did."
"Her old husband, Califia, her brother?"
"It's a long story."
"And you have miles to go before you sleep?"
"Yeah."
"Don't wind up like this old mad hen that lays eggs any color you place me on. Red scarf. Red eggs. Blue rug. Blue. Purple camisole. Purple. That's me. Notice the plaid sheet here?"
It was all white and I told him so.
"You got bad eyes." He surveyed me. "You sure talk a lot. I'm pooped. Bye." And he slammed his eyes shut. "Sir," I said.
"I'm busy," he murmured. "What's my name?" "Fagin, Othello, Lear, O'Casey, Booth, Scrooge." "Oh, yeah." And then he snored.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I TAXIED out to the sea, back to my little place. I needed to think.
And then: there was a blow against my oceanfront door like a sledgehammer. Wham!
I jumped to get it before it fell in.
A flash of light blinded me from a single bright round crystal tucked in a mean eye.
"Hello, Edgar Wallace, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, you!" a voice cried.
I fell back, aghast that he would call me Edgar Wallace, that dime-a-dance el cheapo hack!
"Hello, Fritz," I yelled, "you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, you! Come in!"
"I am!"
As if wearing heavy military boots, Fritz Wong clubbed the carpet. His heels cracked as he seized his monocle to hold it in the air and focus on me. "You're getting old!" he cried with relish.
"You already are!" I cried.
"Insults?"
"You get what you give!"
"Voice down, please."
"You first!" I yelled. "You hear what you called me?"
"Is Mickey Spillane better?"
"Out!"
"John Steinbeck?"
"Okay! Lower your voice."
"Is this okay?" he whispered.
"I can still hear you."
Fritz Wong barked a great laugh.
"That's my good bastard son."
"That's my two-timing illegitimate pa!"
We embraced with arms of steel in paroxysms of laughter.
Fritz Wong wiped his eyes. "Now that we've done the formalities," he rumbled. "How are you.?"
"Alive. You?"
"Barely. Why the delay in delivering provender?"
I brought out Crumley's beer.
"Pig swill," said Fritz. "No wine? But…" He drank deep and grimaced. "Now." He sat down heavily in my only chair. "How can I help?"
"What makes you think I need help?"
"You always will! Wait! I can't stand this." He stomped out into the rain and lunged back with a bottle of Le Gorton, which, silently, he opened with a fancy bright silver corkscrew that he pulled from his pocket.
I brought out two old but clean jelly jars. Fritz eyed them with scorn as he poured.
"1949!" he said. "A great year. I expect loud exclamations!"
I drank.
"Don't chugalug!" Fritz shouted. "For Christ's sake, inhale! Breathe!"
I inhaled. I swirled the wine. "Pretty good."
"Jesus Christ! Good?"
"Let me think."
"Goddammit. Don't think! Drink with your nose! Exhale through your ears!"
He showed me how, eyes shut.
I did the same. "Excellent."
"Now sit down and shut up."
"This is my place, Fritz."
"Not now it isn't."
I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, and he stood over me like Caesar astride an ant farm.
"Now," he said, "spill the beans."
I lined them up and spilled them.
When I finished, Fritz refilled my jelly glass reluctantly.
"You don't deserve this," he muttered, "but yours was a fair performance drinking the vintage. Shut up. Sip."
"If anyone can solve Rattigan," he said, sipping, "it's me. Or should I say, I? Quiet."
He opened the front door on the lovely endless rain. "You like this?"
"Love it."
"Sap!" Fritz screwed his monocle in for a long glance up-shore.
"Rattigan's place up there, eh? Not home for seven days? Maybe dead? Empress of the killing ground, yes, but she will never be caught dead. One day she will simply disappear and no one will know what happened. Now, shall I spill my beans?"
He poured the last of the Le Gorton, hating the jelly glass, loving the wine.
He was at liberty, he said, unemployed. No films for two years. Too old, they said.
"I'm the youngest acrobat in any bed on three continents!" he protested. "Now I have got my hands on Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan. But how do you cast that incredible play? So, meanwhile I have a Jules Verne novel in the public domain, free and clear, with a dumb-cluck fly-by-night producer who says nothing and steals much, so I need a second-rate science-fiction writer-you-to work for scale on this half-ass masterwork. Say yes."
Before I could speak…
There was a huge deluge of rain and a crack of fire and thunder, during which Fritz barked: "You're hired! Now. Do you have more to show and tell?"
I showed and told.
The photos clipped from the ancient newspapers and Scotch-taped on the wall over my bed. Fritz had to half lie down, cursing, to look at the damned things.
"With one eye, the other destroyed in a duel-"
"A duel?" I exclaimed. "You never said-"
"Shut up and read the names under the pictures to the Cyclops German director."
I read the names.
Fritz repeated them.
"Yes, I remember her." He reached to touch. "And that one. And, yes, this one. My God, what a rogues' gallery."
"Did you work with all or some?"
"Some I did two falls out of three in a Santa Barbara motel. I do not brag. A thing is either true or not."
"You've never lied to me, Fritz."
"I have, but you were too stupid to see. Polly. Molly. Dolly. Sounds like a cheap Swiss bell ringers' act. Hold on. Can't be. Maybe. Yes!"
He was leaning up, adjusting his monocle, squinting hard. "Why didn't I see? Dummkopf. But there was time between. Years. That one and that one, and that. Good God!"
"What, Fritz?"
"They're all the same actress, the same woman. Different hair, different hairdo, different color, different makeup. Thick eyebrows, thin eyebrows, no eyebrows. Small lips, large lips. Eyelashes, no eyelashes. Women's tricks. Woman came up to me last week on Hollywood Boulevard and said, 'Do you know me?' 'No,' I said. 'I'm so-and-so,' she said. I studied her nose. Nose job. Looked at her mouth. Mouth job. Eyebrows? New eyebrows. Plus, she had lost thirty pounds and turned blond. How in hell was I supposed to know who she was?
"These pictures, where did you get them?"
"Up on Mount Lowe-"
"That dumb newspaper librarian. I went up there once to do research. Quit. Couldn't breathe in all those goddamn news stacks. Call me, I yelled, when you have a clearance! Constance's dimwit first husband, married when she rebounded off a manslaughter bomb scare. How I managed to direct her in at least three films and never guessed at her changes! Christ! An imp inside a devil inside Lucifer's flesh-eating wife."
"Maybe because," I said, "you were courting Marlene Dietrich one of those years?"
"Courting? Is that what they call it?" Fritz barked a laugh and rocked off the edge of the bed. "Take those damn things down. If I can help, I'll need the junk."
"There's more like this," I said. "Grauman's Chinese, the old projection booth, the old-"
"That crummy lunatic?"
"I wouldn't say that."
"Why not! He had a missing reel of my UFA film Atlantica. I went to see. He tried to tie me to a chair and force-feed me old Rin Tin Tin serials. I threatened to jump off the balcony, so he let me go with Atlantica. So."
He spread the pictures out on the bed and gave them the fiery stare of his monocle.
"You say there are more pictures like these upstairs at Grauman's?"
"Yes," I said.
"Would you mind traveling ninety-five miles an hour in an Alfa-Romeo to get to Grauman's Chinese in less than five minutes?"
The blood drained from my face.
"You would not mind," said Fritz.
He blundered swiftly out into the rain. His Alfa-Romeo was in full space-rocket throttle when I fell in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
"FLASHLIGHT, matches, pad and pencil should we need to leave a note." I checked my pockets.
"Wine," Fritz added, "in case the damn dogs up there on the cliff don't carry brandy."
We passed a bottle of wine between us as we scanned the avalanche of dark stairs leading to the old projection booth.
Fritz smiled. "Me first. If you fall I don't want to catch."
"Some friendship."
Fritz plowed the dark. I plowed after, swiveling the flashlight beam.
"Why are you helping me?" I gasped.
"I called Crumley. He said he's hiding all day in bed. Me, being around half-ass dimwits like you clears my blood and restarts my heart. Watch that flashlight, I might fall."
"Don't tempt me." I bobbed the light.
"I hate to say," Fritz said, "but you give as good as you get. You're my tenth bastard, out of Marie Dressier!"
We were higher now, in nosebleed territory.
We reached the top of the second balcony, Fritz raging at the altitude but happy to hear himself rage.
"Explain again," Fritz said as we continued climbing. "Up here. Then what?"
"Then we go as far down as we've come up. Basement mirror names. A glass catacomb."
"Knock," said Fritz, at last.
I knocked and the projection room door swung inward on dim lights from two projectors, one lit and working.
I swung my flash beam along the wall and sucked air.
"What?" said Fritz.
"They're gone!" I said. "The pictures. The walls have been stripped."
I played my flashlight beam along the empty spaces in dismay. All the dark-room "ghosts" had indeed vanished.
"Goddamn! Jesus! Christ!" I stopped and swore. "My God, I sound like you!"
"My son, my son," Fritz said, pleased. "Move the light!"
"Quiet." I inched forward, holding the beam unsteadily on what sat between the projectors.
It was Constance's father, of course, erect and cold, one hand touching a machine switch.
One projector was running full spin with a reel that looped through the projector lens and down, around, a spiral that repeated images again and again every ten seconds. The small door that could open to let the images shoot down to fill the theater screen was shut, so the images were trapped on the inside of the door, small, but if you bent close and squinted, you could see-
Sally, Dolly, Molly, Holly, Gaily, Nellie, Roby, Sally, Dolly, Molly-around about, on and on.
I studied old man Rattigan, frozen in place, and whether his grimace showed triumph or need, I could not say.
I glanced beyond to those walls now empty of Sally, Dolly, Molly, but whoever had seized them hadn't figured that the old man, seeing his "family" snatched, had switched on this loop to save the past. Or-
My mind sank.
I heard Betty Kelly's voice shrieking what Constance had shrieked, Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. And Quickly recalling, How do I get it back, back, back? Get what back? Her other self?
Did someone do this to you? I thought, standing over the old dead man. Or did you do it to yourself?
The dead man's white marble eyes were still.
I cut the projector.
All the faces still flowed on my retina, the dancing daughter, the butterfly, the Chinese vamp, the tomboy clown.
"Poor lost soul," I whispered.
"You know him?" said Fritz.
"No."
"Then he's no poor lost soul." "Fritz! Did you ever have a heart?" "Simple bypass. I had it removed." "How do you live without it?"
"Because…" Fritz handed me his monocle. I fit the cold glass to my eye and stared.
"Because," he said, "I'm a-"
"Stupid goddamn son of a bitch?"
"Bull's— eye!" Fritz said.
"Let's go," he added. "This place is a morgue."
"Always was," I said.
I called Henry, and told him to take a taxi to Grauman's. Pronto.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
BLIND Henry was waiting for us in an aisle leading down to the orchestra pit and from there to the hidden basement dressing rooms.
"Don't tell," Henry said.
"About what, Henry?"
"The pictures up in that projection booth. Kaput? That's Fritz Wong's lingo."
"The same to you," said Fritz.
"Henry, how'd you guess?"
"I knew." Henry fixed his sightless eyes down at the pit. "I just visited the mirrors. I don't need a cane, and sure as heck no flashlight. Just reached when I was there and touched the glass. That's how I knew the pictures upstairs had to be gone. Felt all along forty feet of glass. Clean. All scraped away. So…" He stared again at the sightless uphill seats. "Upstairs. All gone. Right?"
"Right." I exhaled, somewhat stunned.
"Let me show you." Henry turned to the pit.
"Wait, I've got my flash."
"When you going to learn?" Henry mocked, and stepped down into the pit in one silent motion.
I followed. Fritz glared at our parade.
"Well," I said, "what are you waiting for?"
Fritz moved.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
"THERE." Henry pointed his nose at the long line of mirrors. "What did I say?"
I moved along the aisle of glass, touching with my flash and then my fingers.
"So?" Fritz growled.
"There were names and now no names, just like there were pictures and now no pictures."
"Told you," said Henry.
"How come the sightless are never the wordless?" said Fritz.
"Got to do something to fill the time. Shall I recite the names?"
I said the names from memory.
"You left out Carmen Carlotta," said Henry.
"Oh, yeah. Carlotta."
Fritz glanced up.
"And whoever swiped the pictures upstairs?"
"Cleaned and scraped the mirrors."
"So all those ladies are like they never was," said Henry.
He leaned in along the line of mirrors and gave a last brush with his blind fingertips to the glass here, there, and farther on down. "Yeah. Empty. Damn. Those names were caked on. Took lots to scrub it off. Who?"
"Henrietta, Mabel, Gloria, Lydia, Alice…"
"They all came down to clean up?"
"They did and they didn't. We've already said it, Henry, that all of those women came and went, were born and died, and wrote their names, like grave markers."
"So?"
"And those names were not written all at once. So starting back in the twenties, those women, ladies, whatever, came down here for their obsequies, a funeral of one. When they looked in their first mirror, they saw one face, and when they moved to the next, the face was changed."
"Now you're cooking."
"So, Henry, what's here is a grand parade of funerals, births, and burials, all done with the same two hands and one spade."
"But the scribbles"-Henry reached out to emptiness— "were different."
"People change. She couldn't make up her mind to one life or how to live it. So she stood in front of the mirror and wiped off her lipstick and painted another mouth, and washed off her eyebrows and painted better ones, or widened her eyes and raised her hairline and tilted her hat like a lampshade or took it off and threw it, or took off her dress and stood here starkers."
"Starkers." Henry smiled. "Now you got it."
"Hush," I said.
"That's work," Henry continued. "Scribbling those mirrors, looking to see how she changed."
"Didn't happen overnight. Once a year, maybe two years, and she'd show up with a smaller mouth or a thinner shape and liked what she saw and went away to become that person for half a year or just one summer. How's that, Henry?"
Henry moved his lips, whispering, "Constance.
"Sure," he murmured, "she never smelled the same way twice." Henry shuffled, touching the mirrors until he reached the open manhole. "I'm near, right?"
"One more step would do it, Henry."
We looked down at the round hole in the cement. From below came sounds of winds blowing in from San Fernando, Glendale, and who knows where else-Far Rock-away? The light rain runoff was sliding below, a mere trickle, hardly enough to cool your ankles.
"Dead end," said Henry. "Nothing upstairs, nothing down. Clues to somebody gone. But where?"
As if in answer, a most ungodly cry came from the dark hole in the cold floor. We all jumped.
"Jesus!" Fritz cried.
"Christ!" I yelled.
"Lord!" said Henry. "That can't be Molly, Dolly, Holly, can it?"
I repeated that rosary in silence.
Fritz read my lips and cursed.
The cry came again, farther away, being carried downstream. Tears exploded from my eyes. I jumped forward to sway over the manhole. Fritz grabbed my elbow.
"Did you hear?" I cried.
"Nothing!" said Fritz.
"That scream!"
"That's just the water," Fritz said.
"Fritz!" "You calling me a liar?"
"Fritz!"
"The way you say Fritz, I lie. No lie. You don't really want to, hell, go down there! Godammit!"
"Let me go!"
"If your wife was here, she'd push you in, dummkopf!"
I stared at the open manhole. Far away there was another cry. Fritz cursed.
"You come with me," I said.
"No, no."
"You afraid?"
"Afraid?" Fritz plucked the monocle from his eye. It was like pulling the spigot on his blood. His suntan paled. His eye watered. "Afraid? Of a damn dark stupid underground cave, Fritz Wong?"
"Sorry," I said.
"Don't be sorry for the greatest UFA director in cinema history." He planted his fiery monocle back in its groove.
"Well, what now?" he demanded. "I find a phone and call Crumley to drag you out of this black hole? You goddamn teenage death-wisher!"
"I'm no teenager."
"No? Then why do I see crouched by that damn hole an Olympic chump high-diving into a tide half an inch deep? Go on, break your neck, drown in garbage!"
"Tell Crumley to drive into the storm drain and meet me halfway from the sea. If he sees Constance, grab her. If he finds me, grab even quicker."
Fritz shut one eye to target me with fire from the other, contempt under glass.
"You will take direction from an Academy Award-winning director?"
"What?"
"Drop quick. When you hit, don't stop. Whatever's down there can't grab you if you run! If you see her, tell her to try to catch up. 'Stood?"
" 'Stood!"
"Now die like a dog. Or…"he added, scowling, "live like a stoop who got the hell through."
"Meet you at the ocean?"
"I won't be there!"
"Oh yes you will!"
He lurched toward the basement door, and Henry.
"You want to follow that idiot?" he roared.
"No."
"You afraid of the dark?" "I am the dark!" said Henry. They were gone.
Cursing Germanic curses, I climbed down into mists, fogs, and rains of night.
CHAPTER FORTY
QUITE suddenly I was in Mexico, 1945. Rome, 1950.
Catacombs.
The thing about darkness is you can imagine, in one direction, wall-to-wall mummies torn from their graves because they couldn't pay the funeral rent.
Or kindling by the thousand-bone-piles, polo heads of skulls to be hammered downfield.
Darkness.
And me caught between ways that led to eternal twilights in Mexico, eternity beneath the Vatican.
Darkness.
I stared at the ladder leading up to safety-Blind Henry and angry Fritz. But they were long gone toward the light and the crazies out front of Grauman's.
I heard the surf pounding like a great heart, ten miles downstream in Venice. There, hell, was safety. But twenty thousand yards of dim concrete floor stood between me and the salty night wind.
I gasped air because…
A pale man shambled out of the dark.
I don't mean he walked crazy-legs, but there was something about his whole frame, his knees and elbows, the way his head toppled or his hands flopped like shot birds. His stare froze me.
"I know you," he cried.
I dropped the flashlight.
He grabbed it and exclaimed, "What're you doing down here?" His voice knocked off the concrete walls. "Didn't you used to be—?" He said my name. "Sure! Jesus, you hiding? You down here to stay? Welcome, I guess." His pale shadow arm waved my flashlight. "Some place, eh? Been here horses' years. Came down to see. Never went back. Lotsa friends. Want to meet 'em?"
I shook my head.
He snorted. "Hell! Why would you want to meet these lost underground jerks?"
"How do you know my name?" I said. "Did we go to school together?"
"You don't remember? Hell and damn!"
"Harold?" I said. "Ross?"
There was just the drip of a lone faucet somewhere.
I added more names. Tears leaped to my eyes. Ralph, Sammy, Arnold, school chums. Gary, Philip, off to war, for God's sake.
"Who are you? When did I know you?" "Nobody ever knows anyone," he said, backing off. "Were you my best pal?"
"I always knew you'd get on. Always knew I'd get lost," he said, a mile away.
"The war."
"I died before the war. Died after it. I was never born, so how come?" Fading.
"Eddie! Ed. Edward. Eduardo, it's got to be!" My heart beat swiftly, my voice rose.
"When did you last call? Did you get around to my funeral? Did you even know?"
"I never knew," I said, inching closer.
"Come again. Don't knock. I'll always be here. Wait! You searching for someone?" he cried. "What's she look like? You hear that? What's she look like? Am I right? Yes, no?"
"Yes!" I blurted.
"She went that way." He waved my flash.
"When— ?"
"Just now. What's she doing here in Dante's Inferno?"
"What did she look like?" I burst out.
"Chanel No. 5!"
"What?"
"Chanel! That'll bring the rats running. She'll be lucky if she makes it to the surf. 'Stay off Muscle Beach!' I yelled."
"What?"
"'Stay!' I yelled. She's here somewhere. Chanel No. 5!"
I seized my flash from his hands, turned it back on his ghost face.
"Where?"
"Why?" He laughed wildly.
"God, I don't know."
"This way, yeah, this way."
His laugh caromed in all directions.
"Hold on! I can't see!"
"You don't have to. Chanel!"
More laughter.
I swiveled my flash.
Now, as he babbled, I heard something like weather, a seasonal change, a distant rainfall. Dry wash, I thought, but not dry, a flash flood, this damned place ankle-deep, knee-deep, then drowned all the way to the sea!
I whipped my flashlight beam up, around, back. Nothing. The sound grew. More whispers coming, yes, not a change of season, dry weather becoming wet, but whispers of people, not rain on the channel floor but the slap of bare feet on cement, and the shuffled murmur of quiet discovery, arguments, curiosity.
People, I thought, my God, more shadows like this one, more voices, the whole damn clan, shadows and shadows of shadows, like the silent ghosts on Rattigan's ceiling, specters that flowed up, around, and vanished like rainfall.
But what if her film ghosts had blown free of her projector, and the pale screens up above in Grauman's, and the wind blew and the phantoms caught cobwebs and light and found voices, what if, dear God, what if?
Stupid! I cut the light, for the rain-channel-crazed man was still mumbling and yammering close. I felt his hot breath on my cheek and I lurched back, afraid to light his face, afraid to sluice the channel a second time to freeze the floodwater of ghost voices, for they were louder now, closer. The dark flowed, the unseen crowd gathered, as this crazed fool grew taller, nearer, and I felt a plucking at my sleeves to seize, hold, bind, and the rainfall voices far off blew nearer and I knew that I should get, go, run like hell and hope they were all legless wonders!
"I— " I bleated.
"What's wrong?" my friend cried.
"I-"
"Why are you afraid? Look. Look! Look there!"
And I was thrust and bumped through darkness to a greater mass of darkness, which was a cluster of shadows and then flesh. A crowd gathered around a shape that wept and lamented and yearned and it was the sound of a woman drowning in darkness.
As the woman moaned and cried and wept and grew silent to mourn again, I edged near.
And then someone thought to hold out a cigarette lighter, clicking it so that the small blue flame extended toward a shawled and unkempt creature, that fretting soul.
Inspired, another lighter drifted out of the night, hissing, and breathed light to hold steady. And then another and another, small flame after flame, like so many fireflies gathered in a circle until there was illumination circling steadily. And floating within to reveal that misery, that exaltation, that whispering, that sobbing, that voice of sudden pronouncements, were six, twelve, twenty more small blue fires, thrust and held to ignite the voice, to give it a shape, to shine the mystery. The more firefly lights, the higher the voice shrilled, asking for some unseen gift, recognition, asking for attention, demanding to live, asking to solve that form, face, and presence.
"Only from my voices, I would lose all heart!" she lamented.
What? I thought. What's that? Familiar! I almost guessed. Almost knew. What?
"The bells came down from heaven and their echoes linger in the fields. Through the quiet of the countryside, my voices!" she cried.
What? Almost! Familiar, I thought. Oh God, what?
Then a thunderous flood of storm wind flashed from the far sea, drenched with salt odor and a smash of thunder.
"You!" I cried. "You!"
And all the fires blew out to screams in utter darkness.
I called her name, but the only answer was a torrent of shouts in an avalanche of feet in full stampede.
In the roar and rush and ranting, some soft flesh struck my arm, my face, my knee, and then it was gone as I cried, "You!" and "You!" again.
There was an immense roundabout, a thousand millraces of darkness from which a single flame ignited near my mouth and one of the strange beasts cursed, seeing me, and shouted, "You, you scared her away! You!"
And hands were thrust to snatch at me until I fell back.
"No!" I turned and leaped, hoping to hell it was toward the sea and not the ghosts.
I stumbled and fell. My flashlight skittered. Christ, I thought, if I can't get it back-!
I scrambled on hands and knees. "Oh, please, please!"
And my fingers closed on the flashlight, which resurrected my flesh, got me upright, swaying with the black flood behind, and I broke into a drunken run. Don't fall, I thought, hold" the light like a rope to pull you, don't fall, don't look back! Are they close, are they near, are there others waiting? Great God!
At which moment the most glorious sound cracked the channel. There was an illumination ahead like the sunrise at heaven's door, a loud chant of car horn, an avalanche of thunder! A car.
People like me think in film-bit flashes, over in an instant, dumb in retrospect, but a lightning bolt of exhilaration. John Ford, I thought, Monument Valley! Indians! But now, the damn cavalry!
For ahead, in full plunge from the sea… My salvation, an old wreck. And half standing up front… Crumley. Yelling the worst curses he had ever yelled, cursing me with the foulest curses ever, but glad he had found me and then cursing this damn fool again. "Don't kill me!" I cried. The car braked near my feet. "Not till we get outta here!" Crumley shrieked. The darkness, lit by headlights, reared back. I was frozen with Crumley blaring the horn, waving arms, spitting teeth, going blind.
"You're lucky this damn buggy made it in! What gives?"
I stared back into the darkness.
"Nothing."
"Then you won't be needing a lift!" Crumley gunned the gas.
I jumped in and landed so hard the jalopy shook.
Crumley grabbed my chin. "You okay?"
"Now, yes!"
"We gotta back out!"
"Back out!" I cried. The shadows loomed. "At fifty miles an hour?"
"Sixty!"
Crumley glared at the night.
"Satchel Paige said don't look back. Something may be gaining on you."
A dozen figures lurched into the light.
"Now!" I yelled.
We left…
At seventy miles an hour, backward.
Crumley yelled, "Henry called, said where the damn dumb stupid Martian was!"
"Henry," I gasped.
"Fritz called! Said you were twice as stupid as Henry said!"
"I am! Faster!"
Faster.
I could hear the surf.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
we motored out of the storm drain and I looked south one hundred yards and gasped. "Ohmigod, look!"
Crumley looked.
"There's Rattigan's place, two hundred feet away. How come we never noticed the storm drain came out so close?"
"We never used the storm drain before as Route 66."
"So if we could take it from Grauman's Chinese all the way here, Constance could have gone from here to Grauman's."
"Only if she was nuts. Hell. She was a Brazilian nut factory. Look."
There were a dozen narrow swerving marks in the sand. "Bicycle tracks. Bike it in one hour, tops."
"God, no, I don't see her on a bike."
I stood up in the jalopy to peer back at the tunnel.
"She's there. I doubt she's moved. She's still in there, going somewhere else, not here. Poor Constance."
"Poor?" Crumley erupted. "Tough as a rhino. Keep bellyaching about that five-and-dime floozy, I'll phone your wife to come crack your dog biscuits!"
"I haven't done anything wrong."
"No?" Crumley gunned the car the rest of the way out on the shore. "Three days of maniac running in and out of lousy L.A. palmistry parlors, upstairs Chinese balconies, climbing Mount Lowe! A parade of losers, all because of an A-l skirt who gets the Oscar for loss-leading. Wrong? Rip the roll from my pianola if I've played the wrong tune!"
"Crumley! In that storm drain, I think I saw her. Could I just say 'go to hell'?"
"Sure!"
"Liar," I said. "You drink vodka, pee apple juice. I've got your number."
Crumley gunned the motor. "What're you getting at?"
"You're an altar boy."
"Christ, let me move this wreck out front of that damn fool sailor's delight!"
He drove fast, then slow, eyes half-shut, teeth gritted. "Well?"
I swallowed hard and said, "You're a boy soprano. You made your dad and mom proud at midnight mass. Hell, I've seen the ghost under your skin, in movies where you pretended your eyes weren't wet. A Catholic camel with a broken back. Great sinners, Crum, make great saints. No one's so bad they don't deserve a second chance."
"But no red circles around the names. So? Are they alive or dead?"
"Why not go see," said Henry.
Lightning struck. The lights failed again.
In the dark, Henry said, "Don't tell me, let me guess."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
crumley dropped us by the old apartment house and ran.
"Now," said Henry, "what are we doing here?"
Inside, I glanced up the three-story stairwell. "Searching for Marlene Dietrich alive and well."
Before I even knocked on the door, I caught the perfume through the paneling. I sneezed and knocked.
"Dear God," a voice said. "I haven't a thing to wear."
The door opened and a billowing butterfly kimono stood there with a Victorian relic inside, squirming to make it fit. It stopped squirming and tape-measured my shoes, my knee bones, my shoulders, and finally eye to eye.
"J. Wallington Bradford?" I cleared my throat. "Mr. Bradford?"
"Who's asking?" the creature in the doorway wondered. "Jesus. Come in. Come in. And who's this other thing?"
"I'm the boy's Seeing Eye." Henry probed the air. "That a chair? Think I'll sit. Sure smells strong in here. Nothing personal."
The kimono let loose a blizzard of confetti in its lungs and waved us in with a grand sweep of its sleeve. "I hope it isn't business that brings you here. Sit, while Mama pours gin. Big or small?"
Before I could speak he had filled a big glass with clear Bombay blue crystal liquor. I sipped.
"That's a good boy," said Bradford. "You staying five minutes or the night? My God, he's blushing. Is this about Rattigan?"
"Rattigan!" I cried. "How'd you know?"
"She was here and gone. Every few years Rattigan vanishes. It's how she divorces a new husband, an old lover, God, or her astrologer. ?Quien sabe?"
I nodded, stunned.
"She came years ago, asking how I did it. All those people, she said. Constance, I said, how many cat lives have you had? A thousand? Don't ask which flue I slid up, which bed I ran under!"
"But— "
"No buts. Mother Earth knows all. Constance invented Freud, tossed in Jung and Darwin. Did you know she bedded all six studio heads? It was a bet she took at the Brown Derby from Harry Cohn. Til harvest Jack Warner and his brothers till their ears fly off,' she said.
"All in the same year? Cohn yelled.
"'Year, hell,' said Constance. 'In one week, with Sunday off!'
" 'I bet a hundred you can't!' said Cohn.
" 'Make it a thousand and you're on,' said Constance.
"Harry Cohn glared. 'What will you put up as collateral?'
" 'Me,' said Rattigan.
" 'Shake!' cried Cohn.
"She shook all over. 'Hold these!' She flung her pants in Cohn's lap and fled."
Breathless, J. W. Bradford raved on: "Did you know that once I was Judy Garland. Then Joan Crawford, then Bette Davis. I was Bankhead in Lifeboat. A real nightwalker, late sleeper, bed buster. You need help finding Rattigan? I can list her discards. Some fell in my lap. You want to say something?"
"Is there a real you in there, somewhere?" I said.
"God, I hope not. How terrible to find me in bed with just me! Rattigan. You tried her beach house? Artie Shaw stayed there after Caruso. She got him when she was thirteen. Drove him up the La Scala wall. When she topped off Lawrence Tibbett, he sang soprano. They had a squad car of paramedics by her joint, 1936, when she mouth-to-mouth breathed Thalberg into Forest Lawn. You okay?"
"I just got hit by a ten-ton safe."
"Take more gin. Tallulah says so."
"You'll help us find Constance?"
"No one else can. I loaned her my whole wardrobe a million years back. Gave her my makeup-box rejects, taught her perfumes, how to surprise her eyebrows, lift her ears, shorten her upper lip, widen her smile, flatten or bulge her bosom, walk taller than tall, or fall short. I was a mirror she posed in front of, watching me stare, blink, pretend remorse, alert, despair, delight, sing in a gilded cage, power-dive into pajamas, breaststroke out. She trotted in a high school pony, swarmed out a nest of ballerinas. By the time she left, she was someone else. That was ten thousand vaudevilles ago. And all so she could compete with other actresses for other roles in films, or maybe steal their men.
"Okay, doll," J. W. Bradford said as he scribbled on a pad. "Here's more names of those who loved Constance. Nine producers, ten directors, forty-five at-liberty actors, and a partridge in a pear tree."
"Did she never hold still?"
"Ever see those seals in Rattigan's surf? Slick as oil, quicker than quicksilver, hit the bed like lightning. Number one in the L.A. Marathon long before there was one. Could have been board chairman at three studios, but wound up as Vampira, Madame Defarge, and Dolley Madison. There!"
"Thanks." I scanned a list that would have filled the Bastille twice over.
"Now if you'll forgive, Mata Hari must change.1"
Zip! He flourished his kimono.
Zip! I grabbed Henry's arm and we flew down the stairs and out onto the street.
"Hey!" someone cried. "Wait!"
I turned and looked up. Jean Harlow-Dietrich-Colbert leaned over the top rail, smiling wildly, waiting for Von Stroheim to shoot her close-up.
"There's someone else like me, even crazier. Quickly!"
"Alberto Quickly!" I called. "He's alive?"
"He does one nightclub a week, then hospital rehabs. When they sew him up he repeats his farewell tour. Damn fool, in his nineties, said he found Constance (a lie!) on Route 66 when he was, my God, forty, fifty. Driving across country, he picked up this tomboy with suspicious breasts. Made her a star while his act faded. Runs a theatre intime in his parlor. Charges folks on Friday nights to see Caesar stabbed, Antony on his sword, Cleopatra bitten." A piece of paper sailed down. "There! And something else!"
"What?"
"Connie, Helen, Annette, Roberta. Constance didn't show up for more lessons in changing lives! Last week. She was supposed to come back and didn't."
"I don't understand," I yelled.
"I had taught her things, dark, light, loud, soft, wild, quiet, some sort of new role she was looking for. She was coming back to me to learn some more. She wanted to be a new person. Maybe like her old self. But I didn't know how to help. Role-playing, Jesus, how do you get actors unhooked? W. C. Fields learned to be W. C. Fields in vaudeville. He never escaped those handcuffs. So here was Constance saying 'Help me to find a new self.' I said, 'Constance, I don't know how to help you. Get a priest to put a new skin around you.' "
A great bell rang in my head. Priest.
"Well, that's it," said Jean Harlow. "Did I confuse but amuse? Ciao." Bradford vanished.
"Quickly," I gasped. "Let's call Crumley."
"What's the rush?" said Henry.
"No, no, Alberto Quickly, the rabbit in and out of the hat, Hamlet's father's ghost."
"Oh, him," said Henry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
we dropped Henry off at some nice soft-spoken relatives on Central Avenue and then Crumley delivered me to the home of Alberto Quickly, ninety-nine years old, Rattigan's first "teacher."
"The first," he said. "The Bertillion expert, who fingerprinted Constance toenail to elbow to knees."
In vaudeville he had been known as Mr. Metaphor, who acted all of Old Curiosity Shop or every last one of Fagin's brood in Oliver Twist as audiences cried "Mercy." He was more morbid than Marley, paler than Poe.
Quickly, the critics cried, orchestrated requiems to flood the Thames with mournful tides when, as Tosca, he flung himself into forever.
All this Metaphor-Quickly said glibly, happily, as I sat in his small theater-stage parlor. I waved away the box of Kleenex he offered before he treated me to his Lucia, mad again.
"Stop," I cried at last. "What about Constance?"
"Hardly knew her," he said, "but I did know Katy Kelle-her, 1926, my first Pygmalion child!"
"Pygmalion?" I murmured, pieces falling into place.
"Do you recall Molly Callahan, 1927?"
"Faintly."
"How about Polly Riordan, 1926?"
"Almost."
"Katy was Alice in Wonderland, Molly was Molly in Mad Molly O'Day. Polly was Polly of the Circus, same year. Katy, Molly, Polly-all Constance. A whirlwind blew in nameless, blew out famous. I taught her to shout, 'I'm Polly!' Producers cried, 'You are, you are!' The film was shot in six days. Then I revamped her to jump down Leo the Lion's throat. 'I'm Pretty Katy Kelly.' 'You are!' the lion pride yelled. Her second film done in four days! Kelly vanished, then Molly climbed the RKO radio tower. So it was Molly, Polly, Dolly, Sally, Gerty, Connie… and Constance rabbiting studio lawns!"
"No one ever guessed Constance played more than one part over the years?"
"Only I, Alberto Quickly, helped her to grab onto fame, fortune, and fondling! The golden greased pig! No one ever knew that some of the marquee names on Hollywood Boulevard were names Constance made up or borrowed. Could be she shuffled her tootsies in Grauman's forecourt with four different shoe sizes!"
"And where is Molly, Polly, Sally, Gerty, Connie, now?"
"Even she doesn't know. Here are six different addresses in twelve different summers. Maybe she drowned in deep grass. Years are a great hiding place. God hides you. Duck! What's my name?!"
He did a flip-flop cartwheel across the room. I heard his old bones scream.
"Ta— ta!" He grinned in pain.
"Mr. Metaphor!"
"You got it!" He dropped cold.
I leaned over him, terrified. He popped one eye wide.
"That was a close one. Prop me up. I scared Rattigan so, she ran." He babbled on. "It was only fitting. After all, I'm Fagin, Marley, Scrooge, Hamlet, Quickly. Someone like me had to be curious and try to figure out what year she lived in, or if she ever existed at all. The older I got, the more jealous I became of the gain and loss of Constance. I waited too long over the years, just as Hamlet waited too long to slay the foul fiend who killed his father's ghost! Ophelia and Caesar begged for slaughter. The memory of Constance summoned bull stampedes. So when I turned ninety all my voices raved for revenge. Like a damn fool I sent her the Book of the Dead. So it must be that Constance ran from my madness.
"Call an ambulance," Mr. Metaphor added. "I've got two broken tibias and a herniated groin. Did you write all that down?"
"Later."
"Don't wait! Write it. An hour from now I'll be in Valhalla harassing the statues. Where's my bed?"
I put him to bed.
"Slow down," I said. "That Book of the Dead, you say you sent that to Constance?"
"There was a half-ass semi-garage sale of actors' junk at the Film Ladies' League last month. I got some Fairbanks photos and a Crosby song sheet, and there, by God, was Rattigan's thrown-away phonebook stuffed with all her cat-litter-box lovers. My God, I was the snake in the garden. Grabbed onto damnation for a dime, eyed the lists, drank the poison. Why not give Rattigan bad dreams? Tracked her down, dropped the Dead Book, ran. Did it scare the stuffings out of her?"
"Oh, my God, it did." I stared into Mr. Quickly's grinning face. "Then you didn't have anything to do with that poor old soul lost on Mount Lowe?"
"Constance's first sucker? That stupid old guy is dead?"
"Newspapers killed him."
"Critics do that."
"No. Tons of old Tribunes fell on him."
"One way or the other, they kill."
"And you didn't harass Queen Califia?"
"That old Noah's Ark, two of every kind of lie in her. High/low, hot/cold. Camel dung and horse puckies. She told Constance where to go and she went. She dead, too?"
"Fell downstairs."
"I didn't trip her."
"Then there was the priest…"
"Her brother? Same mistake. Califia told her where to go. But he, my God, told her to go to hell. So Constance went. What killed him? God, everyone's dead!"
"She yelled at him. Or I think it was she." "You know what she yelled?"
"No."
"I do."
"You?"
"Middle of the night, last night, I heard voices, thought I was dreaming. That voice, it had to be her. Maybe what she yelled at that poor damn priest, she yelled at me. Wanna hear?"
"I'm waiting."
"Oh, yeah. She yelled, 'How do I get back, where's the next place, how do I get back?'"
"Get back to where?"
There was a quick spin of thought behind Quickly's eyelids. He snorted.
"Her brother told her where to go and she went. And at last she said, 'I'm lost, show me the way.' Constance wants to be found. That it?"
"Yes. No. God, I don't know."
"Neither does she. Maybe that's why she yelled. But my house is built of bricks. It never fell."
"Others did."
"Her old husband, Califia, her brother?"
"It's a long story."
"And you have miles to go before you sleep?"
"Yeah."
"Don't wind up like this old mad hen that lays eggs any color you place me on. Red scarf. Red eggs. Blue rug. Blue. Purple camisole. Purple. That's me. Notice the plaid sheet here?"
It was all white and I told him so.
"You got bad eyes." He surveyed me. "You sure talk a lot. I'm pooped. Bye." And he slammed his eyes shut. "Sir," I said.
"I'm busy," he murmured. "What's my name?" "Fagin, Othello, Lear, O'Casey, Booth, Scrooge." "Oh, yeah." And then he snored.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I TAXIED out to the sea, back to my little place. I needed to think.
And then: there was a blow against my oceanfront door like a sledgehammer. Wham!
I jumped to get it before it fell in.
A flash of light blinded me from a single bright round crystal tucked in a mean eye.
"Hello, Edgar Wallace, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, you!" a voice cried.
I fell back, aghast that he would call me Edgar Wallace, that dime-a-dance el cheapo hack!
"Hello, Fritz," I yelled, "you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, you! Come in!"
"I am!"
As if wearing heavy military boots, Fritz Wong clubbed the carpet. His heels cracked as he seized his monocle to hold it in the air and focus on me. "You're getting old!" he cried with relish.
"You already are!" I cried.
"Insults?"
"You get what you give!"
"Voice down, please."
"You first!" I yelled. "You hear what you called me?"
"Is Mickey Spillane better?"
"Out!"
"John Steinbeck?"
"Okay! Lower your voice."
"Is this okay?" he whispered.
"I can still hear you."
Fritz Wong barked a great laugh.
"That's my good bastard son."
"That's my two-timing illegitimate pa!"
We embraced with arms of steel in paroxysms of laughter.
Fritz Wong wiped his eyes. "Now that we've done the formalities," he rumbled. "How are you.?"
"Alive. You?"
"Barely. Why the delay in delivering provender?"
I brought out Crumley's beer.
"Pig swill," said Fritz. "No wine? But…" He drank deep and grimaced. "Now." He sat down heavily in my only chair. "How can I help?"
"What makes you think I need help?"
"You always will! Wait! I can't stand this." He stomped out into the rain and lunged back with a bottle of Le Gorton, which, silently, he opened with a fancy bright silver corkscrew that he pulled from his pocket.
I brought out two old but clean jelly jars. Fritz eyed them with scorn as he poured.
"1949!" he said. "A great year. I expect loud exclamations!"
I drank.
"Don't chugalug!" Fritz shouted. "For Christ's sake, inhale! Breathe!"
I inhaled. I swirled the wine. "Pretty good."
"Jesus Christ! Good?"
"Let me think."
"Goddammit. Don't think! Drink with your nose! Exhale through your ears!"
He showed me how, eyes shut.
I did the same. "Excellent."
"Now sit down and shut up."
"This is my place, Fritz."
"Not now it isn't."
I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, and he stood over me like Caesar astride an ant farm.
"Now," he said, "spill the beans."
I lined them up and spilled them.
When I finished, Fritz refilled my jelly glass reluctantly.
"You don't deserve this," he muttered, "but yours was a fair performance drinking the vintage. Shut up. Sip."
"If anyone can solve Rattigan," he said, sipping, "it's me. Or should I say, I? Quiet."
He opened the front door on the lovely endless rain. "You like this?"
"Love it."
"Sap!" Fritz screwed his monocle in for a long glance up-shore.
"Rattigan's place up there, eh? Not home for seven days? Maybe dead? Empress of the killing ground, yes, but she will never be caught dead. One day she will simply disappear and no one will know what happened. Now, shall I spill my beans?"
He poured the last of the Le Gorton, hating the jelly glass, loving the wine.
He was at liberty, he said, unemployed. No films for two years. Too old, they said.
"I'm the youngest acrobat in any bed on three continents!" he protested. "Now I have got my hands on Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan. But how do you cast that incredible play? So, meanwhile I have a Jules Verne novel in the public domain, free and clear, with a dumb-cluck fly-by-night producer who says nothing and steals much, so I need a second-rate science-fiction writer-you-to work for scale on this half-ass masterwork. Say yes."
Before I could speak…
There was a huge deluge of rain and a crack of fire and thunder, during which Fritz barked: "You're hired! Now. Do you have more to show and tell?"
I showed and told.
The photos clipped from the ancient newspapers and Scotch-taped on the wall over my bed. Fritz had to half lie down, cursing, to look at the damned things.
"With one eye, the other destroyed in a duel-"
"A duel?" I exclaimed. "You never said-"
"Shut up and read the names under the pictures to the Cyclops German director."
I read the names.
Fritz repeated them.
"Yes, I remember her." He reached to touch. "And that one. And, yes, this one. My God, what a rogues' gallery."
"Did you work with all or some?"
"Some I did two falls out of three in a Santa Barbara motel. I do not brag. A thing is either true or not."
"You've never lied to me, Fritz."
"I have, but you were too stupid to see. Polly. Molly. Dolly. Sounds like a cheap Swiss bell ringers' act. Hold on. Can't be. Maybe. Yes!"
He was leaning up, adjusting his monocle, squinting hard. "Why didn't I see? Dummkopf. But there was time between. Years. That one and that one, and that. Good God!"
"What, Fritz?"
"They're all the same actress, the same woman. Different hair, different hairdo, different color, different makeup. Thick eyebrows, thin eyebrows, no eyebrows. Small lips, large lips. Eyelashes, no eyelashes. Women's tricks. Woman came up to me last week on Hollywood Boulevard and said, 'Do you know me?' 'No,' I said. 'I'm so-and-so,' she said. I studied her nose. Nose job. Looked at her mouth. Mouth job. Eyebrows? New eyebrows. Plus, she had lost thirty pounds and turned blond. How in hell was I supposed to know who she was?
"These pictures, where did you get them?"
"Up on Mount Lowe-"
"That dumb newspaper librarian. I went up there once to do research. Quit. Couldn't breathe in all those goddamn news stacks. Call me, I yelled, when you have a clearance! Constance's dimwit first husband, married when she rebounded off a manslaughter bomb scare. How I managed to direct her in at least three films and never guessed at her changes! Christ! An imp inside a devil inside Lucifer's flesh-eating wife."
"Maybe because," I said, "you were courting Marlene Dietrich one of those years?"
"Courting? Is that what they call it?" Fritz barked a laugh and rocked off the edge of the bed. "Take those damn things down. If I can help, I'll need the junk."
"There's more like this," I said. "Grauman's Chinese, the old projection booth, the old-"
"That crummy lunatic?"
"I wouldn't say that."
"Why not! He had a missing reel of my UFA film Atlantica. I went to see. He tried to tie me to a chair and force-feed me old Rin Tin Tin serials. I threatened to jump off the balcony, so he let me go with Atlantica. So."
He spread the pictures out on the bed and gave them the fiery stare of his monocle.
"You say there are more pictures like these upstairs at Grauman's?"
"Yes," I said.
"Would you mind traveling ninety-five miles an hour in an Alfa-Romeo to get to Grauman's Chinese in less than five minutes?"
The blood drained from my face.
"You would not mind," said Fritz.
He blundered swiftly out into the rain. His Alfa-Romeo was in full space-rocket throttle when I fell in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
"FLASHLIGHT, matches, pad and pencil should we need to leave a note." I checked my pockets.
"Wine," Fritz added, "in case the damn dogs up there on the cliff don't carry brandy."
We passed a bottle of wine between us as we scanned the avalanche of dark stairs leading to the old projection booth.
Fritz smiled. "Me first. If you fall I don't want to catch."
"Some friendship."
Fritz plowed the dark. I plowed after, swiveling the flashlight beam.
"Why are you helping me?" I gasped.
"I called Crumley. He said he's hiding all day in bed. Me, being around half-ass dimwits like you clears my blood and restarts my heart. Watch that flashlight, I might fall."
"Don't tempt me." I bobbed the light.
"I hate to say," Fritz said, "but you give as good as you get. You're my tenth bastard, out of Marie Dressier!"
We were higher now, in nosebleed territory.
We reached the top of the second balcony, Fritz raging at the altitude but happy to hear himself rage.
"Explain again," Fritz said as we continued climbing. "Up here. Then what?"
"Then we go as far down as we've come up. Basement mirror names. A glass catacomb."
"Knock," said Fritz, at last.
I knocked and the projection room door swung inward on dim lights from two projectors, one lit and working.
I swung my flash beam along the wall and sucked air.
"What?" said Fritz.
"They're gone!" I said. "The pictures. The walls have been stripped."
I played my flashlight beam along the empty spaces in dismay. All the dark-room "ghosts" had indeed vanished.
"Goddamn! Jesus! Christ!" I stopped and swore. "My God, I sound like you!"
"My son, my son," Fritz said, pleased. "Move the light!"
"Quiet." I inched forward, holding the beam unsteadily on what sat between the projectors.
It was Constance's father, of course, erect and cold, one hand touching a machine switch.
One projector was running full spin with a reel that looped through the projector lens and down, around, a spiral that repeated images again and again every ten seconds. The small door that could open to let the images shoot down to fill the theater screen was shut, so the images were trapped on the inside of the door, small, but if you bent close and squinted, you could see-
Sally, Dolly, Molly, Holly, Gaily, Nellie, Roby, Sally, Dolly, Molly-around about, on and on.
I studied old man Rattigan, frozen in place, and whether his grimace showed triumph or need, I could not say.
I glanced beyond to those walls now empty of Sally, Dolly, Molly, but whoever had seized them hadn't figured that the old man, seeing his "family" snatched, had switched on this loop to save the past. Or-
My mind sank.
I heard Betty Kelly's voice shrieking what Constance had shrieked, Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. And Quickly recalling, How do I get it back, back, back? Get what back? Her other self?
Did someone do this to you? I thought, standing over the old dead man. Or did you do it to yourself?
The dead man's white marble eyes were still.
I cut the projector.
All the faces still flowed on my retina, the dancing daughter, the butterfly, the Chinese vamp, the tomboy clown.
"Poor lost soul," I whispered.
"You know him?" said Fritz.
"No."
"Then he's no poor lost soul." "Fritz! Did you ever have a heart?" "Simple bypass. I had it removed." "How do you live without it?"
"Because…" Fritz handed me his monocle. I fit the cold glass to my eye and stared.
"Because," he said, "I'm a-"
"Stupid goddamn son of a bitch?"
"Bull's— eye!" Fritz said.
"Let's go," he added. "This place is a morgue."
"Always was," I said.
I called Henry, and told him to take a taxi to Grauman's. Pronto.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
BLIND Henry was waiting for us in an aisle leading down to the orchestra pit and from there to the hidden basement dressing rooms.
"Don't tell," Henry said.
"About what, Henry?"
"The pictures up in that projection booth. Kaput? That's Fritz Wong's lingo."
"The same to you," said Fritz.
"Henry, how'd you guess?"
"I knew." Henry fixed his sightless eyes down at the pit. "I just visited the mirrors. I don't need a cane, and sure as heck no flashlight. Just reached when I was there and touched the glass. That's how I knew the pictures upstairs had to be gone. Felt all along forty feet of glass. Clean. All scraped away. So…" He stared again at the sightless uphill seats. "Upstairs. All gone. Right?"
"Right." I exhaled, somewhat stunned.
"Let me show you." Henry turned to the pit.
"Wait, I've got my flash."
"When you going to learn?" Henry mocked, and stepped down into the pit in one silent motion.
I followed. Fritz glared at our parade.
"Well," I said, "what are you waiting for?"
Fritz moved.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
"THERE." Henry pointed his nose at the long line of mirrors. "What did I say?"
I moved along the aisle of glass, touching with my flash and then my fingers.
"So?" Fritz growled.
"There were names and now no names, just like there were pictures and now no pictures."
"Told you," said Henry.
"How come the sightless are never the wordless?" said Fritz.
"Got to do something to fill the time. Shall I recite the names?"
I said the names from memory.
"You left out Carmen Carlotta," said Henry.
"Oh, yeah. Carlotta."
Fritz glanced up.
"And whoever swiped the pictures upstairs?"
"Cleaned and scraped the mirrors."
"So all those ladies are like they never was," said Henry.
He leaned in along the line of mirrors and gave a last brush with his blind fingertips to the glass here, there, and farther on down. "Yeah. Empty. Damn. Those names were caked on. Took lots to scrub it off. Who?"
"Henrietta, Mabel, Gloria, Lydia, Alice…"
"They all came down to clean up?"
"They did and they didn't. We've already said it, Henry, that all of those women came and went, were born and died, and wrote their names, like grave markers."
"So?"
"And those names were not written all at once. So starting back in the twenties, those women, ladies, whatever, came down here for their obsequies, a funeral of one. When they looked in their first mirror, they saw one face, and when they moved to the next, the face was changed."
"Now you're cooking."
"So, Henry, what's here is a grand parade of funerals, births, and burials, all done with the same two hands and one spade."
"But the scribbles"-Henry reached out to emptiness— "were different."
"People change. She couldn't make up her mind to one life or how to live it. So she stood in front of the mirror and wiped off her lipstick and painted another mouth, and washed off her eyebrows and painted better ones, or widened her eyes and raised her hairline and tilted her hat like a lampshade or took it off and threw it, or took off her dress and stood here starkers."
"Starkers." Henry smiled. "Now you got it."
"Hush," I said.
"That's work," Henry continued. "Scribbling those mirrors, looking to see how she changed."
"Didn't happen overnight. Once a year, maybe two years, and she'd show up with a smaller mouth or a thinner shape and liked what she saw and went away to become that person for half a year or just one summer. How's that, Henry?"
Henry moved his lips, whispering, "Constance.
"Sure," he murmured, "she never smelled the same way twice." Henry shuffled, touching the mirrors until he reached the open manhole. "I'm near, right?"
"One more step would do it, Henry."
We looked down at the round hole in the cement. From below came sounds of winds blowing in from San Fernando, Glendale, and who knows where else-Far Rock-away? The light rain runoff was sliding below, a mere trickle, hardly enough to cool your ankles.
"Dead end," said Henry. "Nothing upstairs, nothing down. Clues to somebody gone. But where?"
As if in answer, a most ungodly cry came from the dark hole in the cold floor. We all jumped.
"Jesus!" Fritz cried.
"Christ!" I yelled.
"Lord!" said Henry. "That can't be Molly, Dolly, Holly, can it?"
I repeated that rosary in silence.
Fritz read my lips and cursed.
The cry came again, farther away, being carried downstream. Tears exploded from my eyes. I jumped forward to sway over the manhole. Fritz grabbed my elbow.
"Did you hear?" I cried.
"Nothing!" said Fritz.
"That scream!"
"That's just the water," Fritz said.
"Fritz!" "You calling me a liar?"
"Fritz!"
"The way you say Fritz, I lie. No lie. You don't really want to, hell, go down there! Godammit!"
"Let me go!"
"If your wife was here, she'd push you in, dummkopf!"
I stared at the open manhole. Far away there was another cry. Fritz cursed.
"You come with me," I said.
"No, no."
"You afraid?"
"Afraid?" Fritz plucked the monocle from his eye. It was like pulling the spigot on his blood. His suntan paled. His eye watered. "Afraid? Of a damn dark stupid underground cave, Fritz Wong?"
"Sorry," I said.
"Don't be sorry for the greatest UFA director in cinema history." He planted his fiery monocle back in its groove.
"Well, what now?" he demanded. "I find a phone and call Crumley to drag you out of this black hole? You goddamn teenage death-wisher!"
"I'm no teenager."
"No? Then why do I see crouched by that damn hole an Olympic chump high-diving into a tide half an inch deep? Go on, break your neck, drown in garbage!"
"Tell Crumley to drive into the storm drain and meet me halfway from the sea. If he sees Constance, grab her. If he finds me, grab even quicker."
Fritz shut one eye to target me with fire from the other, contempt under glass.
"You will take direction from an Academy Award-winning director?"
"What?"
"Drop quick. When you hit, don't stop. Whatever's down there can't grab you if you run! If you see her, tell her to try to catch up. 'Stood?"
" 'Stood!"
"Now die like a dog. Or…"he added, scowling, "live like a stoop who got the hell through."
"Meet you at the ocean?"
"I won't be there!"
"Oh yes you will!"
He lurched toward the basement door, and Henry.
"You want to follow that idiot?" he roared.
"No."
"You afraid of the dark?" "I am the dark!" said Henry. They were gone.
Cursing Germanic curses, I climbed down into mists, fogs, and rains of night.
CHAPTER FORTY
QUITE suddenly I was in Mexico, 1945. Rome, 1950.
Catacombs.
The thing about darkness is you can imagine, in one direction, wall-to-wall mummies torn from their graves because they couldn't pay the funeral rent.
Or kindling by the thousand-bone-piles, polo heads of skulls to be hammered downfield.
Darkness.
And me caught between ways that led to eternal twilights in Mexico, eternity beneath the Vatican.
Darkness.
I stared at the ladder leading up to safety-Blind Henry and angry Fritz. But they were long gone toward the light and the crazies out front of Grauman's.
I heard the surf pounding like a great heart, ten miles downstream in Venice. There, hell, was safety. But twenty thousand yards of dim concrete floor stood between me and the salty night wind.
I gasped air because…
A pale man shambled out of the dark.
I don't mean he walked crazy-legs, but there was something about his whole frame, his knees and elbows, the way his head toppled or his hands flopped like shot birds. His stare froze me.
"I know you," he cried.
I dropped the flashlight.
He grabbed it and exclaimed, "What're you doing down here?" His voice knocked off the concrete walls. "Didn't you used to be—?" He said my name. "Sure! Jesus, you hiding? You down here to stay? Welcome, I guess." His pale shadow arm waved my flashlight. "Some place, eh? Been here horses' years. Came down to see. Never went back. Lotsa friends. Want to meet 'em?"
I shook my head.
He snorted. "Hell! Why would you want to meet these lost underground jerks?"
"How do you know my name?" I said. "Did we go to school together?"
"You don't remember? Hell and damn!"
"Harold?" I said. "Ross?"
There was just the drip of a lone faucet somewhere.
I added more names. Tears leaped to my eyes. Ralph, Sammy, Arnold, school chums. Gary, Philip, off to war, for God's sake.
"Who are you? When did I know you?" "Nobody ever knows anyone," he said, backing off. "Were you my best pal?"
"I always knew you'd get on. Always knew I'd get lost," he said, a mile away.
"The war."
"I died before the war. Died after it. I was never born, so how come?" Fading.
"Eddie! Ed. Edward. Eduardo, it's got to be!" My heart beat swiftly, my voice rose.
"When did you last call? Did you get around to my funeral? Did you even know?"
"I never knew," I said, inching closer.
"Come again. Don't knock. I'll always be here. Wait! You searching for someone?" he cried. "What's she look like? You hear that? What's she look like? Am I right? Yes, no?"
"Yes!" I blurted.
"She went that way." He waved my flash.
"When— ?"
"Just now. What's she doing here in Dante's Inferno?"
"What did she look like?" I burst out.
"Chanel No. 5!"
"What?"
"Chanel! That'll bring the rats running. She'll be lucky if she makes it to the surf. 'Stay off Muscle Beach!' I yelled."
"What?"
"'Stay!' I yelled. She's here somewhere. Chanel No. 5!"
I seized my flash from his hands, turned it back on his ghost face.
"Where?"
"Why?" He laughed wildly.
"God, I don't know."
"This way, yeah, this way."
His laugh caromed in all directions.
"Hold on! I can't see!"
"You don't have to. Chanel!"
More laughter.
I swiveled my flash.
Now, as he babbled, I heard something like weather, a seasonal change, a distant rainfall. Dry wash, I thought, but not dry, a flash flood, this damned place ankle-deep, knee-deep, then drowned all the way to the sea!
I whipped my flashlight beam up, around, back. Nothing. The sound grew. More whispers coming, yes, not a change of season, dry weather becoming wet, but whispers of people, not rain on the channel floor but the slap of bare feet on cement, and the shuffled murmur of quiet discovery, arguments, curiosity.
People, I thought, my God, more shadows like this one, more voices, the whole damn clan, shadows and shadows of shadows, like the silent ghosts on Rattigan's ceiling, specters that flowed up, around, and vanished like rainfall.
But what if her film ghosts had blown free of her projector, and the pale screens up above in Grauman's, and the wind blew and the phantoms caught cobwebs and light and found voices, what if, dear God, what if?
Stupid! I cut the light, for the rain-channel-crazed man was still mumbling and yammering close. I felt his hot breath on my cheek and I lurched back, afraid to light his face, afraid to sluice the channel a second time to freeze the floodwater of ghost voices, for they were louder now, closer. The dark flowed, the unseen crowd gathered, as this crazed fool grew taller, nearer, and I felt a plucking at my sleeves to seize, hold, bind, and the rainfall voices far off blew nearer and I knew that I should get, go, run like hell and hope they were all legless wonders!
"I— " I bleated.
"What's wrong?" my friend cried.
"I-"
"Why are you afraid? Look. Look! Look there!"
And I was thrust and bumped through darkness to a greater mass of darkness, which was a cluster of shadows and then flesh. A crowd gathered around a shape that wept and lamented and yearned and it was the sound of a woman drowning in darkness.
As the woman moaned and cried and wept and grew silent to mourn again, I edged near.
And then someone thought to hold out a cigarette lighter, clicking it so that the small blue flame extended toward a shawled and unkempt creature, that fretting soul.
Inspired, another lighter drifted out of the night, hissing, and breathed light to hold steady. And then another and another, small flame after flame, like so many fireflies gathered in a circle until there was illumination circling steadily. And floating within to reveal that misery, that exaltation, that whispering, that sobbing, that voice of sudden pronouncements, were six, twelve, twenty more small blue fires, thrust and held to ignite the voice, to give it a shape, to shine the mystery. The more firefly lights, the higher the voice shrilled, asking for some unseen gift, recognition, asking for attention, demanding to live, asking to solve that form, face, and presence.
"Only from my voices, I would lose all heart!" she lamented.
What? I thought. What's that? Familiar! I almost guessed. Almost knew. What?
"The bells came down from heaven and their echoes linger in the fields. Through the quiet of the countryside, my voices!" she cried.
What? Almost! Familiar, I thought. Oh God, what?
Then a thunderous flood of storm wind flashed from the far sea, drenched with salt odor and a smash of thunder.
"You!" I cried. "You!"
And all the fires blew out to screams in utter darkness.
I called her name, but the only answer was a torrent of shouts in an avalanche of feet in full stampede.
In the roar and rush and ranting, some soft flesh struck my arm, my face, my knee, and then it was gone as I cried, "You!" and "You!" again.
There was an immense roundabout, a thousand millraces of darkness from which a single flame ignited near my mouth and one of the strange beasts cursed, seeing me, and shouted, "You, you scared her away! You!"
And hands were thrust to snatch at me until I fell back.
"No!" I turned and leaped, hoping to hell it was toward the sea and not the ghosts.
I stumbled and fell. My flashlight skittered. Christ, I thought, if I can't get it back-!
I scrambled on hands and knees. "Oh, please, please!"
And my fingers closed on the flashlight, which resurrected my flesh, got me upright, swaying with the black flood behind, and I broke into a drunken run. Don't fall, I thought, hold" the light like a rope to pull you, don't fall, don't look back! Are they close, are they near, are there others waiting? Great God!
At which moment the most glorious sound cracked the channel. There was an illumination ahead like the sunrise at heaven's door, a loud chant of car horn, an avalanche of thunder! A car.
People like me think in film-bit flashes, over in an instant, dumb in retrospect, but a lightning bolt of exhilaration. John Ford, I thought, Monument Valley! Indians! But now, the damn cavalry!
For ahead, in full plunge from the sea… My salvation, an old wreck. And half standing up front… Crumley. Yelling the worst curses he had ever yelled, cursing me with the foulest curses ever, but glad he had found me and then cursing this damn fool again. "Don't kill me!" I cried. The car braked near my feet. "Not till we get outta here!" Crumley shrieked. The darkness, lit by headlights, reared back. I was frozen with Crumley blaring the horn, waving arms, spitting teeth, going blind.
"You're lucky this damn buggy made it in! What gives?"
I stared back into the darkness.
"Nothing."
"Then you won't be needing a lift!" Crumley gunned the gas.
I jumped in and landed so hard the jalopy shook.
Crumley grabbed my chin. "You okay?"
"Now, yes!"
"We gotta back out!"
"Back out!" I cried. The shadows loomed. "At fifty miles an hour?"
"Sixty!"
Crumley glared at the night.
"Satchel Paige said don't look back. Something may be gaining on you."
A dozen figures lurched into the light.
"Now!" I yelled.
We left…
At seventy miles an hour, backward.
Crumley yelled, "Henry called, said where the damn dumb stupid Martian was!"
"Henry," I gasped.
"Fritz called! Said you were twice as stupid as Henry said!"
"I am! Faster!"
Faster.
I could hear the surf.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
we motored out of the storm drain and I looked south one hundred yards and gasped. "Ohmigod, look!"
Crumley looked.
"There's Rattigan's place, two hundred feet away. How come we never noticed the storm drain came out so close?"
"We never used the storm drain before as Route 66."
"So if we could take it from Grauman's Chinese all the way here, Constance could have gone from here to Grauman's."
"Only if she was nuts. Hell. She was a Brazilian nut factory. Look."
There were a dozen narrow swerving marks in the sand. "Bicycle tracks. Bike it in one hour, tops."
"God, no, I don't see her on a bike."
I stood up in the jalopy to peer back at the tunnel.
"She's there. I doubt she's moved. She's still in there, going somewhere else, not here. Poor Constance."
"Poor?" Crumley erupted. "Tough as a rhino. Keep bellyaching about that five-and-dime floozy, I'll phone your wife to come crack your dog biscuits!"
"I haven't done anything wrong."
"No?" Crumley gunned the car the rest of the way out on the shore. "Three days of maniac running in and out of lousy L.A. palmistry parlors, upstairs Chinese balconies, climbing Mount Lowe! A parade of losers, all because of an A-l skirt who gets the Oscar for loss-leading. Wrong? Rip the roll from my pianola if I've played the wrong tune!"
"Crumley! In that storm drain, I think I saw her. Could I just say 'go to hell'?"
"Sure!"
"Liar," I said. "You drink vodka, pee apple juice. I've got your number."
Crumley gunned the motor. "What're you getting at?"
"You're an altar boy."
"Christ, let me move this wreck out front of that damn fool sailor's delight!"
He drove fast, then slow, eyes half-shut, teeth gritted. "Well?"
I swallowed hard and said, "You're a boy soprano. You made your dad and mom proud at midnight mass. Hell, I've seen the ghost under your skin, in movies where you pretended your eyes weren't wet. A Catholic camel with a broken back. Great sinners, Crum, make great saints. No one's so bad they don't deserve a second chance."