"Rattigan's had ninety!"
"Would Jesus have kept count?"
"Damn, yes!"
"No, because some far-off late night, you'll call a priest to bless you and he'll carry you back to some Christmas night when your dad was proud and your ma cried and as you shut your eyes you'll be so damned glad to be home again you won't have to go pee to hide your tears. You still haven't given up hope. Know why?"
"Why, dammit?"
"Because I want it for you, Crum. Want you to be happy, want you to come home to something, anything, before it's too late. Let me tell you a story-"
"Why are you blabbing at a time like this? You just barely got away from a tribe of lunatics. What did. you see in that flood channel?"
"I don't know, I'm not sure."
"Ohmigod, wait!" Crumley rummaged in the glove compartment and with a cry of relief uncorked a small flask and drank. "If I have to sit here with the tide going out and your hot air rising-speak."
I spoke: "When I was twelve a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, came to my hometown. He touched me with his flaming sword and yelled, 'Live forever!' Why did he tell me that, Crumley? Was there something in my face, the way I acted, stood, sat, talked, what? All I know is somehow, burning me with his great eyes, he gave me my future. Leaving the carnival, I stood by the carousel, heard the calliope playing 'Beautiful Ohio,' and I wept. I knew something incredible had happened, something wonderful and nameless. Within three weeks, twelve years old, I started to write. I have written every day since. How come, Crumley, how come?"
"Here," said Crumley. "Finish this."
I drank the rest of the vodka.
"How come?" I said quietly again.
Now it was Crumley's turn: "Because he saw you were a romantic sap, a Dumpster for magic, a cloud-walker who found shadows on ceilings and said they were real. Christ, I don't know. You always look like you've just showered even if you rolled in dog doo. I can't stand all your innocence. Maybe that's what Electrico saw. Where's that vodka? Oh yeah, gone. You done?"
"No," I said. "Since Mr. Electrico pointed me in the right direction, shouldn't I pay back? Do I keep Mr. Electrico to myself, or let him help me save her?"
"Psychic crap!"
"Hunches. I don't know any other way to live. When I got married friends warned Maggie I wasn't going anywhere. I said, 'I'm going to the Moon and Mars, want to come along?' And she said yes. So far, it hasn't been so bad, has it? And on your way to a 'bless me, Father,' and a happy death, can't you find it in your heart to bring Rattigan?"
Crumley stared straight ahead.
"You mean all that?"
He reached over and touched under my eyes and brought his fingers back to his tongue.
"The real stuff," he murmured. "Salt. Your wife said you cry at phone books," he said quietly.
"Phone books full of people lost in graveyards, maybe. If I quit now, I'd never forgive myself. Or you, if you made me stop."
After a long moment Crumley shifted out of the car. "Wait," he said, not looking at me. "I got to go pee."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
he came back after a long while.
"You sure know how to hurt a guy," he said as he climbed back into the jalopy.
"Just stir, don't shake."
Crumley cocked his head at me. "You're a queer egg."
"You're another."
We drove slowly along the shore toward Rattigan's. I was silent.
"You got another hairball?" Crumley said.
"Why is it," I said, "someone like Constance is a lightning bolt, performing seal, high-wire frolicker, wild laughing human, and at the same time she's the devil incarnate, an evil cheater at life's loaded deck?"
"Go ask Alexander the Great," said Crumley. "Look at Attila the Hun, who loved dogs; Hitler, too. Bone up on Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Mao, hell's Anvil Chorus. Rommel, good family man. How do you cradle cats and cut throats, bake cookies and people? How come we love Richard the Third, who dumped kids in wine casks? How come TV is all Al Capone reruns? God won't say."
"I don't ask. He turned us loose. It's up to us, once He took off the leash. Who wrote, 'Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God's way towards Man?' I rewrote it and added, And Freud spoils kids and spares the rod, to justify Man's ways toward God.'"
Crumley snorted. "Freud was a nut loose in a fruit patch. I always believed smart-ass punks need their teeth punched."
"My dad never broke my teeth."
"That's because you're a half-stale Christmas fruitcake, the kind no one eats."
"But Constance is beautiful?
"You mistake energy for beauty. Overseas, French girls knocked me flat. They blink, wave, dance, stand on their heads to prove they're alive. Hell, Constance is all battery acid and short circuit. If she ever slows down she'll get-"
"Ugly? No!"
"Gimme those!" He seized the glasses off my nose and peered through them.
"Rose— colored! How do things look without them?"
"Nothing's there."
"Great! There's not much worth seeing!"
"There's Paris in the spring. Paris in the rain. Paris on New Year's Eve."
"You been there?"
"I saw the movies. Paris. Gimme."
"I'll just keep these until you take waltz lessons from blind Henry." Crumley shoved my glasses in his pocket.
As we pulled our jalopy up on the shore in front of the white chateau, we saw two dark shapes by her oceanside pool, under the umbrella, to keep off the moonlight.
Crumley and I trudged up the dune and peered in at Blind Henry and angry Fritz Wong. There were martinis laid out on a tray.
"I knew," Henry said, "after that storm drain you'd seek refreshment. Grab. Drink."
We grabbed and drank.
Fritz soaked his monocle in vodka, thrust it in his stare, and said, "That's better!" And then he finished the drink.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I WENT 'round, placing camp chairs by the pool.
Crumley watched with a dour eye and said, "Let me guess. This is the finale of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, and Poirot's got all the usual suspects stashed poolside."
"Bull s— eye."
"Proceed."
I proceeded.
"This chair here is for the Mount Lowe collector of old newspapers."
"Who will testify in absentia?"
"In absentia. This next chair is for Queen Califia, long gone, with her palmistry and head bumps."
I kept moving. "Third chair: Father Rattigan. Fourth chair: Grauman's Chinese mile-high projectionist. Fifth chair: J. W. Bradford, a.k.a. Tallulah, Garbo, Swanson, Colbert. Sixth: Professor Quickly, a.k.a. Scrooge, Nicholas Nickleby, Richard the Third. Seventh chair: me. Eighth chair: Constance."
"Hold on."
Crumley got up and pinned his badge on my shirt.
"We going to sit here," said Fritz, "and listen to a fourth-rate Nancy Drew-"
"Stash your monocle," said Crumley.
Fritz stashed his monocle.
"Now," said Crumley, "junior?"
Junior moved behind the chairs.
"For starters, I'm Rattigan running in the rain with two Books of the Dead. Some already dead, some about to die."
I laid the two books on the glass-top table.
"We all know now that Quickly, in a spurt of nostalgic madness, sent the one book, with all the dead people, to frighten Constance. She came running from her past, her memories of a fast, furious, and destructive life."
"You can say that again," said Crumley.
I waited.
"Sorry," said Crumley.
I picked up the second book, Constance's more personal, recent phone lists.
"But what if Constance, hit by the old Book of the Dead, got wired back into her griefs, her losses in that past, and decided, in order to make do with it, she had to destroy it, person by person, one by one. What if she red-lined the names and forgot she had done it?"
"What if?" Crumley sighed.
"Let the idiot express his delight." Fritz Wong tucked his monocle back in his eye and leaned forward. "So the Ratti-gan goes to kill, maim, or at least threaten her own past, ja?" he said with heavy Germanic concern.
"Is that the way the next scene plays?" I asked.
"Action," said Fritz, amused.
I swayed behind the first empty chair.
"Here we are at the dead end of the old trolley-tram line on Mount Lowe."
Fritz and Crumley nodded, seeing the mummy there, wrapped in headlines.
"Wait." Blind Henry squinted. "Okay, I'm there."
"Her first husband is there, her first big mistake. So she goes up to swipe the newspapers with all her old selves filed away. She grabs the papers, like I did, and gives a final yell. Whether she pushed the landslide of newsprint, or gave one last shriek, who knows? Regardless, the Mount Lowe trolley master drowned in a bad-news avalanche. Okay?"
I looked over at Crumley, whose mouth gaped with his "okay." He nodded, as did Fritz. Henry sensed this and gave the go-ahead.
"Chair number two. Bunker Hill. Queen Califia. Predictor of futures, insurer of fates."
I held on to the chair as if I pushed that massive elephant on roller skates.
"Constance shouted outside her door. Califia wasn't murdered any more than that Mount Lowe Egyptian relic was. Yelled at, sure, by Rattigan, telling Califia to take back all her lousy predictions that insured the future. Califia had unrolled a papyrus road map, Constance followed, blind as a bat-sorry, Henry-all enthusiasm. Would Califia lie? No! Was the future wondrous? You betcha! Now, late in the game, Constance wanted retractions. Califia would have retracted, told new lies, and gone on living, but alarmed, fell downstairs into her grave. Not murder, but panic."
"So much for Califia," said Crumley, trying to hide his approval.
"Scene three, take one," said Fritz.
"Scene three, take one, chair number three." I moved. "This here is the confessional booth, St. Vibiana's."
Fritz scooched his chair closer, his monocle a lighthouse flash, searching my small private stage. He chopped his head at me to continue.
"And here's Rattigan's bighearted brother, trying to lead her along the straight and narrow. When Califia said 'left,' he yelled 'right,' and maybe after years of storms of brutal sin, he threw up his hands, tossed her out of the church. But she came back, raving, demanding absolution, screaming her demands, purify me, forgive me, your own flesh, give way, give in, but he clapped his hands over his ears and yelled against her yell, and his yells, not hers, struck him dead."
"So you say," said Fritz, one eye shut, the fire from his monocle stabbing. "Prove it. If we're going to shoot this like a goddamn film, write me the moment of truth. Tell how you know the priest killed himself with his own rage, yes?"
"Who the hell's the detective here?" Crumley cut in.
"The boy wonder is," drawled Fritz, not looking at him, still shooting lightning bolts of optical glass at me. "He gets hired or fired by what he next claims."
"I'm not applying for a job," I said.
"You've already got it," said Fritz. "Or get thrown out on your ass. I'm the studio head and you're plea-bargaining. How do you know the priest was self-murdered?"
I exhaled.
"Because I heard him breathe, watched his face, saw him run. He couldn't stand Constance diving in the surf one way, to come out another. She was hot desert air, he was fog. Collision. Lightning. Bodies."
"All from one priest and one bad sister?"
"Saint. Sinner," I said.
Fritz Wong stiffened with a glow in his face and a most ungodly smile.
"You got the job. Crumley?"
Crumley reared back from Fritz but at last nodded. "As proof? It'll do. Next?"
I moved on to the next chair.
"Here we are at Grauman's Chinese, up high, late night, film running, figures on the screen, pictures on the wall. All of Rattigan's former selves nailed, ready to be nabbed. And the one man who really knows her, bum to belly button, her dad, keeper of the unholy flame, but he doesn't want her either, so she busts in and swipes the pictures that prove her past. She's got to burn those, too, because she doesn't like all her former selves. The final bust-in puts her pa in shock, like all the rest. Torn both ways-after all, it is his daughter-he lets the pictures go but runs the film on a continuous roundabout reel, Molly, Dolly, Sally, Holly, Gala, Willa, Sue… The reel's still running and the faces lit when we arrive too late to save him or the swiped photos. Unmurder number four…"
"So J. Wellington Bradford a.k.a. Tallulah Bankhead cum Crawford cum Colbert is still alive, and he's not a victim?" said Crumley. "The same goes for quick-change artist Quickly?"
"Alive but not for long. They're as flimsy as kites in a long storm. Constance ranted at them-"
"Because?" said Crumley.
"They taught her all the ways to not be herself," said Fritz, proud of his insight. "Don't do this, do that, don't do that, do this. Richard the Third tells you how to be Lear's daughter, Lady Macbeth, Medea. One size fits all. So she became Electra, Juliet, Lady Godiva, Ophelia, Cleopatra. Bradford said. Rattigan did. Same with Quickly. See Connie run! She had to show up on both their doorsteps to disrobe, junk her lines, burn her notices. Can teachers unteach? Constance demanded. 'Who is Constance, what is she?' was the essence of her declaration. Being only forward teachers, they didn't know how to teach backward. So, Constance was driven to-"
"The basement dressing rooms," I said. "Snatch the pictures from upstairs, sure, but then wipe out the evidence of her former selves on the mirrors. Scrape, erase, eliminate, name by name, year by year."
I finished and sipped my drink and shut up.
"Is the train in Murder on the Orient Express pulling into the station?" said Fritz, lying back full-length like Caesar in his bath.
"Yes."
"Furthermore," said Fritz Wong in his fine Germanic guttural, "are you free to accept work on a screenplay titled The Many Deaths of Rattigan, starting Monday, five hundred a week, ten weeks, twenty thousand bonus if we finally shoot the goddamn film?"
"Take the money and run," said Henry.
"Crumley, you want me to take his offer?" I said.
"It's dumb thinking but a great film," said Crumley.
"You don't believe me?" I cried.
"Nobody could be as nuts as you just said," said Crumley.
"Good God, why have I stood here upchucking my guts?" I sank in my chair.
"I don't want to live," I said.
"Yes, you do." Fritz leaned forward, scribbling on a pad.
Five hundred a week was there.
He threw a five-dollar bill on top.
"Your first ten minutes' salary!"
"Then you almost believe? No." I pushed the paper away. "Got to be one of you here gets my idea."
"Me," a voice said.
We all looked at Blind Henry.
"Sign the contract," he said, "but make him sign saying he really believes every word you say!"
I hesitated, then scribbled my own manifesto.
Rumbling, Fritz signed.
"That Constance," he growled. "Damn! She shows up at your door, flings herself on you like a goddamn snake. Hell! Who cares if she kills herself? Why should she run scared of her own phone books and look up all the stupid people who led her down the garden path? Would phone books scare you? Christ, no! There had to be a reason for her setting out to run, to seek. Motivation. Why, goddammit, why all that work, to get what? Hold on."
Fritz stopped, his face suddenly pale, then slowly suffusing with color. "No. Yes. No, couldn't be. No. Yes. Is!"
"Is what, Fritz?"
"I'm glad I talk to myself," said Fritz. "I'm glad I listen. Did anyone hear?"
"You haven't said, Fritz."
"I'll talk to myself, and you eavesdrop, ja?"
"Ja," I said.
Fritz shot me through the heart with one glare. He doused his irritation with a swallow of his martini and said, "A month ago, two months, she threw herself across my desk, with heavy breaths. Was it true, she cried, I was starting some new film? A movie yet nameless? 'Ja,' I said. 'Yes, maybe.' And is there a part for me?' she said, on my shoulder, in my lap. 'No, no,' I said. 'Yes, there must be. There has to be. Tell me, Fritz, what is it?' I should have never told her. But I did, God help me!"
"What was the film, Fritz?"
"'What I'm planning is beyond you,' I said."
"Yes, but for God's sake, Fritz. Name the film!"
Fritz ignored me, staring through that monocle into the starry sky, still talking to himself while we eavesdropped.
"'You can't do it,' I said. She wept. 'Please,' she begged. ' Try me.' I said, 'Constance, it's something you can never be, something you never were.'" Fritz took another swig from his glass. "The Maid of Orleans."
"Joan of Arc!"
"'Oh, my God,' she cried. 'Joan! If it's the only thing I ever do, I must do that!'"
Must do that! came the echo.
Joan!
A voice cried in my ears. Rain fell. Water ran.
A dozen lighters took fire and were thrust out toward the sad, weeping woman.
"Only for my voices, I would lose all heart! The bells came down from heaven and their echoes linger in the fields. Through the quiet of the countryside, my voices!"
The subterranean audience gasped with: Joan.
Joan of Arc.
"Ohmigod, Fritz," I cried. "Say that again!"
"Saint Joan?"
I leaped back, my chair fell.
Fritz went on: "I said, 'Constance, it's too late.' She said, 'It's never too late.' And I said, 'Listen, I'll give you a test. If you pass, if you can do the scene from Shaw's Saint Joan… impossible, but if you can, you get the job.' She fell apart. She cried, 'Wait! I'm dying! Wait, I'll be back.' And she ran away."
I said, "Fritz, do you know what you've just said?"
"Gottdammit, yes! Saint Joan!"
"Oh, Christ, Fritz, don't you see? We've been thrown off by what she said to Father Rattigan. 'I've killed, I've murdered! Help me bury them,' she cried. We thought she meant old Rattigan up on Mount Lowe, Queen Califia on Bunker Hill, but no, dammit, she didn't murder them, she was out to get help to murder Constance!"
"How's that again?" said Crumley.
'"Help me kill Constance,' said Constance. Why? For Joan of Arc! That's the answer. She has to have that role. All this month she's been preparing for it. Isn't that it, Fritz?"
"Just a moment while I take my monocle out and put it back in." Fritz stared at me.
"Fritz, look! She's not right for the part. But there is one way she can be Saint Joan!"
"Dammit to hell, say it!"
"Dammit, Fritz, she had to get away from you, fall back, take a long, hard look at her life. She had to, one by one, kill all her selves, lay all the ghosts, so that when all those Constances were dead, she could come for her test, and maybe, just maybe, land the part. She hasn't had a role like that ever in her life. This was her big chance. And the only way she could do it was to kill the past. Don't you see, Fritz? That must be the answer to what's been going on during the last week, with all these people, with Constance appearing, disappearing, and reappearing again."
Fritz said, "No, no!"
I said, "Yes, yes. The answer's been lying right in front of us, but it's only when you said the name. Saint Joan is the motive for every woman who ever lived. Impossible dream. Can't be attained."
"I'll be gottdammed."
"Oh, no, Fritz!" I said. "Blessed! You've solved it! Now, if we find Constance and say to her, maybe, just maybe, she has a chance. Maybe, maybe-" I broke off. "Fritz," I said. "Answer me."
"What?"
"If Constance should suddenly appear as the Maid of Orleans, if she were incredibly young, changed in some strange way, would you give her the job?"
Fritz scowled. "Don't push me, dammit!"
I said, "I'm not. Look. Was there ever a time when she could have played the Maid?"
"Yes," he said after a moment. "But that was then and this is now!"
"Hear me out. What if, by some miracle, she should show up? When you think of her, just standing there, don't think of her past at all. When you remember the woman you once knew, if she asked, would you give her the role?"
Fritz pondered, took his glass, downed it, refilled it from a frosted crystal pitcher, and then said, "God help me, I think I might. Don't press me, don't press!"
"Fritz," I said, "if we could find that Constance and she asked you, would you at least consider taking a chance on her?"
"Oh, God," Fritz rumbled. "Jesus! Yes! No! I don't know!"
"Fritz!"
"Don't yell, goddammit! Yes! A qualified yes!"
"Okay! All right! Wonderful! Now, if only-"
My eyes strayed, scanning the length of shore to the distant storm-drain entrance. Too late, I glanced away.
Both Crumley and Fritz had caught the look.
"Junior knows where Medea is, right now," said Crumley.
Yes, God, I thought, I know! But my yell had scared her away!
Fritz focused his monocle on that storm-drain entrance.
"Is that where you came out?" he said.
"No thanks to junior here," said Crumley.
"I rode shotgun," I said guiltily.
"Like hell! Shouldn't have been in that sinkhole to start with. Probably found Rattigan, then lost her again."
Probably! I thought. Oh, God, probably!
"That storm drain," Fritz Wong mused. "Maybe, just maybe, you ran the wrong way?"
"I what?" I said, stunned.
"Here in crazy Hollywood," said Fritz, "is there not more than one way to go? The storm drains, they head in all directions?"
"South, north, west, and-" I slowed down. "East," I said slowly. It's not easy to say "east" slowly, but I did.
"East!" Fritz cried. "Ja, east, east!"
We let our thoughts roam over the hills and down toward Glendale. No one ever went to Glendale, except…
If someone was dead.
Fritz Wong twisted his monocle in his fierce right eye and probed the eastern skyline, smiling a wonderfully vicious smile.
"Gottdamn!" he said. "This will make the great finale. No script needed. Shall I tell you where Rattigan is? East! Gone to earth!"
"Gone to what*. " said Crumley.
"Sly fox, swift cat. Rattigan. Gone to earth. Tired, ashamed of all her lives! Hide them all in one final Cleopatra's carpet, roll them up, deposit them in Eternity's bank. Fade out. Darkness. Plenty of earth there to go to."
He made us wait.
"Forest Lawn," he said.
"Fritz, that's where they bury people!"
"Who's directing this?" Fritz said. "You took the wrong turn toward open air, the sea, life. Rattigan headed east. Death called her by all two dozen names. She answered with one voice."
"BS!" said Crumley.
"You're fired," said Fritz.
"I was never hired," said Crumley. "What's next?"
"Go and prove I am right!" said Fritz.
"So," said Crumley. "Rattigan climbed down into that storm drain and walked east, or drove, or was driven east?"
"That," said Fritz, "is how I would shoot it. Film! Delii" cious!
"But why would she go to Forest Lawn?" I protested weakly, thinking perhaps I had sent her there.
"To die!" said Fritz triumphantly. "Go read Ludwig Bemelmans' tale of the old man, dead, put a lit candle on his head, hung flowers around his neck, and walked, a one-man funeral, to his own grave! Constance, she does the same. She's gone to die a last time, yes? Now, do I put my car in gear? Will someone follow? And do we go aboveground or take the storm drain direct?"
I looked at Crumley, he looked at me, and we both looked at Blind Henry. He felt our gaze, nodded.
Fritz was already gone, the vodka with him.
"Lead the way," said Henry. "Swear a little now and then to give me direction."
Crumley and I headed for Crumley's old jalopy, Henry in our wake.
Fritz, in his car ahead, banged his motor, blew his horn.
"Okay, you damn Kraut!" cried Crumley.
He thrummed his engine, exploding.
"Which way to the nearest road rage, dammit?"
We paused by the storm drain, stared in, then out at the open road.
"Which is it, smart-ass?" said Crumley. "Dante's Inferno or Route 66?"
"Let me think," I said.
"Oh, no you don't!" Crumley cried.
Fritz was gone. We looked along the beach and couldn't see his car anywhere.
We looked to our right. There, speeding off down the tunnel, were two red lights. "Christ!" Crumley yelled. "He's heading in on the flood channel! Damned fool!"
"What are we going to do?" I said.
"Nothing," cried Crumley. "Just this!" He rammed the gas. We swerved and plunged into the tunnel.
"Madness!" I cried.
"Damn tootin'," said Crumley. "Goddamn!"
"I'm glad I can't see this," Henry said from the backseat, speaking to the wind in his face.
We raced up the flood channel, heading inland.
"Can we do it?" I cried. "How high is the flood channel?"
"Most places it's ten feet high," Crumley shouted. "The farther in we get, the higher the ceilings. Floods come down the mountains in Glendale, then the channel has to be really big to take the flood. Hold on!"
Ahead of us, Fritz's car had almost vanished. "Idiot!" I said. "Does he really know where he's going?"
"Yes!" said Crumley. "All the way to Grauman's Chinese then left to the goddamn marble orchard."
The sound of our motor was shattering. In that thunder we saw ahead of us a tide of those lunatics who had assaulted me. "My God," I cried. "We'll hit them! Don't slow down! Those crazies! Keep going!"
We raced along the channel. Our engine roared. The history of LA. streamed past us on the walls: pictographs, graffiti, crazed illustrations left by wandering homeless in 1940, 1930, 1925, faces and images of terrible things and nothing alive.
Crumley floored the gas. We plunged at the crazed underground mob who shrieked and screamed a horrible welcome. But Crumley didn't slow. We cut through them, tossed them aside.
One ghost rose up flailing, gibbering.
Ed, Edward, Eddie, oh Eduardo! I thought. Is that you?
"You never said good-bye!" the ghost raved and fell away.
I wept and we raced on, outpacing my guilt. We left all behind and the farther we went, the more terrified I became.
"How in hell do we know where we are?" I said. "There aren't any directions down here. Or we can't see them."
Crumley said, "I think that maybe, yeah, let's see." For there were signs on the walls, scribbled in chalk, some in black painted letters.
Crumley slowed the car. On the wall ahead of us someone had etched a bunch of crucifixes and cartoon tombstones.
Crumley said, "If Fritz is any guide, we're in Glendale."
"That means…" I said.
"Yeah," he said. "Forest Lawn."
He put on his high beams and swerved the car right and left as we moved slowly, and we saw a ladder leading up to a grate covered by a manhole in the tunnel ceiling and Fritz's car beneath it, and him out of the car and climbing the ladder. A series of crosses ran alongside the ladder leading up.
We got out of the car and crossed the dry wash and began to climb the ladder. There was a thundering clang above us. We saw Fritz's shape and the manhole shoved aside, and the beginnings of a gentle rain pelting his shoulders.
We climbed the ladder in silence. Above us, Fritz was directing and shouting. "Get the hell up here, you damn fools!"
We looked down.
Blind Henry was not about to be left behind.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
the storm was over but the drizzle stayed. The sky was a loon sky-promising much, delivering little.
"Are we there yet?" said Henry.
We all looked in the gates at Forest Lawn Cemetery, a sweeping hillside covered with a cannonade of memorial stones embedded like meteors in its grass.
"They say that place," said Crumley, "has a greater voting population than Paducah, Kentucky, Red River, Wyoming, or East End, Azusa."
"I like old-fashioned graveyards," said Henry. "Things you can run your hands over. Tombs you can lie on like statues or bring your lady in late hours to play doctor."
"Anyone ever gone in just to check the boy Davids fig leaf?" said Fritz.
"I hear tell," said Henry, "when they shipped him over, there was no leaf, so he lay around the north forty a year, under canvas, so old ladies in tennis shoes wouldn't be offended. Day before the fig leaf was glued on to spoil the fun, they had to beat off a gloveless Braille Institute convention. Live folks doing gymnastics in midnight graveyards is called foreplay. Dead folks doing the same is afterplay."
We stood there in the drizzle looking across the way to the mortuary offices.
"Gone to earth," I heard someone murmur. Me.
"Move!" said Crumley. "In thirty minutes the rain from the hills hits below. The flood will wash our cars down to the sea."
We stared at the gaping manhole. We could hear the creek whispering below.
"My God!" said Fritz. "My classic car!"
"Move!" said Crumley.
We ducked across the street and into the mortuary building.
"Who do we ask?" I said. "And what do we ask?"
There was a moment of colliding looks, pure confusion. "Do we ask for Constance?" I said.
"Talk sense," said Crumley. "We ask about all those newspaper headlines and names. All those lipstick aliases on the basement dressing-room mirrors."
"Say again," said Henry.
"I'm talking pure circumstantial metaphor," said Crumley. "Double time!"
We double-timed it into the vast halls of death, or to put it another way, the land of clerks and file cabinets.
We did not have to take a number and wait, for a very tall man with ice-blond hair and an oyster complexion glided to the front desk and disdained us as if we were discards from a steam laundry.
He laid a card on the desktop and dared Crumley to take it. "You Grey?" he said.
"Elihu Phillips Grey, as you see."
"We're here to buy gravesites and plots."
A late— winter smile appeared on Elihu P. Grey's mouth and hung there, like a mist. With a magician's gesture, he manifested a chart and price sheet.
Crumley ignored it. "First, I got a list."
He pulled out all the names I had put together but placed it upside down in front of Grey, who scanned the list in silence.
So Crumley pulled forth a rolled wad of one-hundred-dollar bills.
"Hold that, will you, junior?" he said, tossing the wad to me. And then, to Grey: "You know those names?"
"I know all the names." Grey relapsed into silence.
Crumley swore under his breath. "Recite them, junior."
I recited the names, one by one.
"Holly Morgan."
Grey flicked through his file.
"She's here. Buried 1924."
"Polly Starr?"
Another quick run-through.
"Here. 1926."
"How about Molly Circe?"
"Right. 1927."
"Emily Danse?"
"1928."
"All buried here, for sure?"
Grey looked sour. "I have never once in all my life been wrong. Strange, however." He rescanned the items he had drawn out of the file. "Odd. Are they all related, all one family?"
"How do you mean?"
Grey fixed his arctic stare at the names. "Because, see here, they're all entombed in the same aboveground Gothic stone hut."
"How's that again?" Crumley lurched from his boredom and grabbed the file cards. "What?"
"Odd, all those different surnames, put to rest in one tomb, a memorial dwelling with eight shelves for eight family members."
"But they aren't family!" said Fritz.
"Odd," said Grey. "Strange."
I stood as if struck by lightning.
"Hold on," I whispered.
Fritz and Crumley and Henry turned to me.
Grey lifted his snowy eyebrows. "Ye-e-ss." He made two long syllables out of it. "Well?"
"The tomb house? The family vault? There must be a name on the portico. The name chiseled in marble?"
Grey scanned his cards, making us wait.
"Rattigan," he said.
"Are you sure?"
"I have never-"
"Yes, I know! The name again!"
We all held our breath.
"Rattigan." His cold voice issued from a steel-trap mouth.
We let our air out.
At last I said, "They can't all be there in that one vault."
Grey shut his eyes. "I-"
"I know, I know," I said quickly. I stared at my friends.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Jesus Christ," murmured Crumley. "Goddamn. Can you give us directions to the Rattigan tomb?"
Grey scribbled on a notepad map. "Easy to find. There're fresh flowers out front. The tomb door is open. There will be a memorial service there tomorrow."
"Who's being entombed?"
We all waited, eyes shut, guessing the answer.
"Rattigan," said Grey, almost smiling. "Someone named Constance Rattigan."
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE rain was so thick the graveyard disappeared. All we could see as we drove uphill in an electric runabout were monuments on the side of the road. The path ahead vanished in the downpour. I carried a map on my lap, marked with an arrow and the name of the area. We stopped.
"It's there," said Crumley. "Azalia Gardens? Plot sixteen. Neo-Palladian edifice."
The rain blew back like a curtain and a flicker of lightning showed us a slender tomb with Palladian pillars on each side of a tall metal door, which stood ajar.
"So if she wants out," said Henry, "she's out. Or invite folks in. Rattigan!"
The rain lifted and blew away and the tomb waited while thunder ran along the far brim of the graveyard. The open door trembled.
Crumley spoke almost to himself: "Jesus! Constance buried herself. Name after name. Year after year. When she was done with one act, one face, one mask, she hired a tomb and stashed herself away. And now, to get the job, maybe, from Fritz, she's killing all her selves again. Don't go in there, Willie."
"She's in there now," I said.
"Horse apples," said Crumley. "Goddamn intuition?"
"No." I shivered. "Goddamn hunch. She's got to be saved." I climbed out.
"She's dead!"
"I'll save her anyway?
"Like hell you will!" said Crumley. "You're under arrest! Get back in here!"
"You're the law, sure, but you're my friend."
I was flooded with cold rain.
"Dammit, dammit all to hell. Go on! Run, you stupid idiot! We'll be waiting downhill. I'll be goddamned if I'll sit and watch your head come flying out that goddamn door. Come find us! Damn you!"
"Hold on!" Fritz cried.
"Hold goddamn nothing!"
Fritz threw a small flask that hit me in the chest.
I stood shivering in the cold downpour and gave Fritz a long look as Crumley, cursing, got out of the runabout slowly. We stood in the big mortuary field with an open iron gate and open tomb door and the rain threatening to wash the bodies out of the earth. I shut my eyes and drank the vodka.
"Ready or not," I whispered. "Here goes."
"Goddammit," said Crumley.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
it was a dark and stormy night.
My God, I thought, again?
Feet running. A cry. Lightning, thunder, a few nights back.
And here, my God, the same again!
The gates of heaven burst, a flood poured in darkness, with me near a cold tomb with someone crazed and maybe dead deep in the dark.
Stop, I told myself.
Touch.
The outer gate creaked. The inner door squealed.
We stood in the entry of the marble tomb with the sun gone, never to return, and the rain to rain forever.
It was dark, but there were three small blue votive candles lit and wavering in the draft from the door.
We all looked at the sarcophagus down below on our right.
Holly's name was there. But there was no lid on the sarcophagus and it was empty, save for a powdering of dust.
Our eyes looked up to the next shelf.
Lightning flickered outside in the rain. Thunder mumbled.
On the next shelf Molly's name was cut in marble. But again no lid, and the sarcophagus was empty.
Rain drenched the open door behind us as we looked at the next-to-top and topmost shelves and marble cases. We saw the names of Emily and Polly. We could see one was unoccupied. Trembling, I reached up to probe the top casement. My fingers touched only empty air.
Holly, Polly, Molly, and Emily, but in the flickers of lightning no bodies, no remains.
I stared up at that final enclosure and began to reach up when there was the faintest gasp and something like a cold weeping, far away.
I took my hand down and looked at Crumley. He looked up at the last sarcophagus and at last said, "Junior, it's all yours." There was a final intake of breath above in the shadows.
"Okay," said Crumley, "everyone out."
Everyone backed out into the whispering rain. At the door Crumley looked back at his lunatic child, handed me a flashlight, nodded good luck, and was gone.
I was alone.
I pulled back. The flashlight fell. I almost collapsed. It took a long while before I found and raised its beam, my heartbeat quaked with it.
"You," I whispered, "there."
Jesus, what did that mean?
"It's," I whispered, "me."
Louder.
"I came to find you," I whispered.
"So?" the shadow murmured. The rain behind me fell in a solid sheet. Lightning shimmered. But still no thunder.
"Constance," I said at last to the dark shape on the tall shelf with the shadows of rain curtaining it. "Listen."
And at last I said my name.
Silence.
I spoke again.
Oh God, I thought, she's really dead!
No more of this! Get out, damn, go! But even in turning, the slightest shrug, it happened. The shadow above with a faceless face quickened with the merest breath.
I hardly heard, I only sensed the shadow.
"What?" it exhaled.
I quickened, glad for life, any life, any pulse.
"My name." I gave it again.
"Oh," someone murmured.
Which hammered me to quicker life. I leaned away from rain into cold tomb air.
"I've come to save you," I whispered.
"So?" the voice murmured.
It was the merest mosquito dance in the air, not heard, no, not there. How could a dead woman speak?
"Good," the whisper said. "Night."
"Don't sleep!" I cried. "Sleep and you won't come back! Don't die."
"Why?" came the murmur.
"Because," I gasped. "Because. I say so."
"Say." A sigh.
Jesus, I thought, say something!
"Say!" said the faintest shadow.
"Come out!" I murmured. "This isn't your place!"
"Yes." The faintest brush of sound.
"No!" I cried.
"Mine," came the breath in the shadow.
"I'll help you get away," I said.
"From what?" the shadow said. And then, in terrible fear: "Gone. They are gone!"
"They?"
"Gone? They've got to be! Are they?"
Lightning struck the dark acres at last, thunder knocked the tomb. I spun to stare out at the meadows of stone, the hills of shining slabs with names being sluiced away. And the slabs and stones were lit by the fires in the sky and became names on mirror glass, photos on walls, inked names on papers, and again mirror names and dates being washed away down a storm drain while the pictures fell from the walls and the film slithered through the projector to dance faces on a silver screen ten thousand miles below. Pictures, mirrors, films. Films, mirrors, pictures. Names, dates, names.
"Are they still there?" said the shadow on the top shelf of the tomb.
"Out there in the rain?"
I looked out at the long hill of the mortuary place. The rain was falling on a dozen and a hundred and a thousand stones.
"They mustn't be there," she said. "I thought they were gone forever. But then they began to knock at the door, wake me. I swam out to my friends, the seals. But no matter how far I swam, they were waiting for me on the shore. The whisperers who want to remember what I want to forget."
She hesitated. "So if I couldn't outrun them, I'd have to kill them one by one, one by one. Who were they? Me? So I chased them instead of them me, and one by one I found where they were buried and buried them again. 1925, then 1928, 1930, '35. Where they would stay forever. Now it's time to lie down and sleep forever, or they might call me again at three in the morning. So, where am I?
The rain fell outside the crypt. There was a long moment of silence and I said, "You're here, Constance, and I'm here, listening."
After a while she said, "Are they all gone, is the shore clear now, can I swim back in and not be afraid?"
I said, "Yes, Constance, they're really buried. You did the job. Someone had to forgive you, that someone had to be Constance. Come out."
"Why?" said the voice from the top shelf of the tomb.
"Because," I said, "this is all crazy, but you're needed. So, please, rest for a moment, and then put your hand out and let me help you down. Do you hear me, Constance?"
The sky went dark. The fires died. The rain fell, erasing the stones and slabs and the names, the names, the terrible names cut to last but dissolving in grass.
"Are they?" came the frantic whisper.
And I said, my eyes filled with cold rain, "Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes," I said. "The yard's empty. The picture's dropped. The mirrors are clean. Now there's only you and me."
The rain washed the unseen stones sinking deep in the flooded grass.
"Come out," I said quietly.
Rain fell. Water slid on the road. The monuments, stones, slabs, and names were lost.
"Constance, one final thing."
"What?" she whispered.
After a long pause I said, "Fritz Wong is waiting. The screenplay is finished. The sets are built and ready."
I shut my eyes and agonized to remember.
Then, at last, I remembered: " 'Only for my voices, I would lose all heart.' "
I hesitated, then continued: " 'It is in the bells I hear my voices. The bells come down from heaven and the echoes linger. In the quiet of the countryside, my voices are there. Without them I would lose heart.' "
Silence.
A shadow moved. A white shape motioned.
The tips of her fingers came out into the shadows and then her hand and then the slender arm.
Then, after a long silence, a deep breath, an exhalation, Constance said: "I'm coming down."
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE storm was gone. It was as if it had never been. The sky was clean, not a cloud anywhere, and a fresh breeze was blowing as if to clean a slate, or a mirror, or a mind.
I stood on the beach in front of Rattigan's Arabian fort with Crumley and Henry, mostly silent, and Fritz Wong surveying the scene for long shots and close-ups.
Inside the house two men in white coveralls moved like shadows and I was put in mind of altar attendants somehow, the mind of a crazed writer freely associating, and I wished that somehow, wild as it seemed, Father Rattigan could be there, could be one of those white figures cleaning the house with a censer of incense and a rain of holy water, to re-sanctify a place that had probably never been anywhere near sanctified. Good God, I thought, bring a priest to cleanse a den of iniquity! The housepainters, inside, scraping the walls clean in order to apply fresh paint, worked steadily, not knowing whose house it was and what had lived there. Outside on a table by the pool were some beers for Crumley, Fritz, Henry, and myself, and vodka, if our mood changed.
The smell of fresh paint was invigorating; it promised a lunatic redemption, and an echo of forgiveness. New paint, new life? Please, God.
"How far out does she go?" Crumley stared at the breakers a hundred yards off shore.
"Don't ask me," said Henry.
"Out with the seals," I said, "or sometimes in close. She has a lot of friends out there. Hear?"
The seals were barking, louder or softer I couldn't say, I only heard. It was a glad sound to go with the fresh paint in an old house made new.
"Tell the painters when they paint her mailbox," said Fritz, "to leave room for just one name, ja?"
"Right," said Henry. He cocked his head to one side, and then frowned. "She's been swimming a long time. What if she don't come in?"
"That wouldn't be so bad," I said. "She loves the water offshore."
"Swells after a storm, fine for surfing. Hey! That was loud!"
The kind of loud that made for a theatrical entrance.
With superb timing, a cab roared up in the alley behind Rattigan's.
"God!" I said. "I know who that is!"
A door slammed. A woman came slogging across the sand that ran between the house and seaside pool, her hands clenched in tight balls. She stood before me like a blast furnace and raised her fists.
"What have you got to say for yourself?" Maggie cried.
"Sorry?" I bleated.
"Sorry!"
She hauled off and struck me a terrible blow on the nose.
"Hit him again," Crumley suggested.
"Once more for luck," offered Fritz.
"What's going on?" said Henry.
"Bastard!"
"I know."
"Son of a bitch!"
"Yes," I said.
She struck a second time.
The blood gushed. It flooded my chin and drenched my upraised hands. Maggie pulled back.
"Oh, God," she cried, "what have I done!"
"Hit a son of a bitch and bastard," Fritz answered.
"Right," said Crumley.
"You keep out of this!" Maggie yelled. "Someone get a Band-Aid."
I looked at the bright flow on my hands. "Band-Aids won't work."
"Shut up, you stupid womanizer!"
"Only one" I bleated.
"Hold still!" she cried, and raised her fist again.
I held still and she collapsed.
"No, no, enough, enough," she wept. "Oh God, this is terrible."
"Go ahead, I deserve it," I said.
"Do you, do you?"
"Yeah," I said.
Maggie glared at the far surf. "Where is she? Out there?"
"Somewhere."
"I hope she never comes in!"
"Me, too."
"What in hell does that mean?"
"I don't know," I said as quietly as possible. "Maybe she belongs out there. Maybe she has friends, dumb friends, and maybe she should stay with them and never come in again."
"If she does, I'll kill her."
"Then she's better off staying way out."
"Are you defending her, damn you?"
"No, just saying she should never have come in. She was always happier on days like this, after a storm, when the waves are right and the clouds are gone. I saw her a few times like that. She didn't drink all day, just kept going out, and there was always the promise she wouldn't come back."
"What got into you? What got into her?"
"Nobody knows. It happens all the time. No alibis. It's just things happen, and next thing you know it's all gone to hell."
"Keep talking, maybe you'll make sense."
"No, the more talk the less sense. She was lost for a long time. Now, maybe, she's found. A lot of bull, a lot of malarkey, I don't know. I promised her if she swam out with all those names, she might swim back in as just one. Promises, promises. We'll know when she comes ashore."
"Shut up. You know I love you, don't you, you dumb bastard?"
"I know."
"In spite of all this, you rat, I still love you, God help me. Is this what all women put up with?"
"Most," I said. "Most. No explanations. No reason. Awful truths. The dog wanders. The dog comes home. The dog smiles. You hit him. He forgives you for forgiving him. And it's back home to the kennel or a lonely life. I don't want a lonely life. Do you?"
"Jesus help me, no I don't. Wipe your nose."
I wiped it. More blood.
"I'm sorry," she cried.
"Don't be. That's the last thing for you to be. Don't."
"Hold it!" said Henry. "Listen."
"What?" said everyone at once.
"Feel it?" said Henry.
"What, what, dammit?"
"The big surf, the biggest wave, coming in, now," murmured Henry. "And bringing something with it."
Way out, the seals barked.
Way out, a huge wave curled.
Crumley, Fritz, Henry, Maggie, and I held our breath.
And the wave came in.
"Would Jesus have kept count?"
"Damn, yes!"
"No, because some far-off late night, you'll call a priest to bless you and he'll carry you back to some Christmas night when your dad was proud and your ma cried and as you shut your eyes you'll be so damned glad to be home again you won't have to go pee to hide your tears. You still haven't given up hope. Know why?"
"Why, dammit?"
"Because I want it for you, Crum. Want you to be happy, want you to come home to something, anything, before it's too late. Let me tell you a story-"
"Why are you blabbing at a time like this? You just barely got away from a tribe of lunatics. What did. you see in that flood channel?"
"I don't know, I'm not sure."
"Ohmigod, wait!" Crumley rummaged in the glove compartment and with a cry of relief uncorked a small flask and drank. "If I have to sit here with the tide going out and your hot air rising-speak."
I spoke: "When I was twelve a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, came to my hometown. He touched me with his flaming sword and yelled, 'Live forever!' Why did he tell me that, Crumley? Was there something in my face, the way I acted, stood, sat, talked, what? All I know is somehow, burning me with his great eyes, he gave me my future. Leaving the carnival, I stood by the carousel, heard the calliope playing 'Beautiful Ohio,' and I wept. I knew something incredible had happened, something wonderful and nameless. Within three weeks, twelve years old, I started to write. I have written every day since. How come, Crumley, how come?"
"Here," said Crumley. "Finish this."
I drank the rest of the vodka.
"How come?" I said quietly again.
Now it was Crumley's turn: "Because he saw you were a romantic sap, a Dumpster for magic, a cloud-walker who found shadows on ceilings and said they were real. Christ, I don't know. You always look like you've just showered even if you rolled in dog doo. I can't stand all your innocence. Maybe that's what Electrico saw. Where's that vodka? Oh yeah, gone. You done?"
"No," I said. "Since Mr. Electrico pointed me in the right direction, shouldn't I pay back? Do I keep Mr. Electrico to myself, or let him help me save her?"
"Psychic crap!"
"Hunches. I don't know any other way to live. When I got married friends warned Maggie I wasn't going anywhere. I said, 'I'm going to the Moon and Mars, want to come along?' And she said yes. So far, it hasn't been so bad, has it? And on your way to a 'bless me, Father,' and a happy death, can't you find it in your heart to bring Rattigan?"
Crumley stared straight ahead.
"You mean all that?"
He reached over and touched under my eyes and brought his fingers back to his tongue.
"The real stuff," he murmured. "Salt. Your wife said you cry at phone books," he said quietly.
"Phone books full of people lost in graveyards, maybe. If I quit now, I'd never forgive myself. Or you, if you made me stop."
After a long moment Crumley shifted out of the car. "Wait," he said, not looking at me. "I got to go pee."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
he came back after a long while.
"You sure know how to hurt a guy," he said as he climbed back into the jalopy.
"Just stir, don't shake."
Crumley cocked his head at me. "You're a queer egg."
"You're another."
We drove slowly along the shore toward Rattigan's. I was silent.
"You got another hairball?" Crumley said.
"Why is it," I said, "someone like Constance is a lightning bolt, performing seal, high-wire frolicker, wild laughing human, and at the same time she's the devil incarnate, an evil cheater at life's loaded deck?"
"Go ask Alexander the Great," said Crumley. "Look at Attila the Hun, who loved dogs; Hitler, too. Bone up on Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Mao, hell's Anvil Chorus. Rommel, good family man. How do you cradle cats and cut throats, bake cookies and people? How come we love Richard the Third, who dumped kids in wine casks? How come TV is all Al Capone reruns? God won't say."
"I don't ask. He turned us loose. It's up to us, once He took off the leash. Who wrote, 'Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God's way towards Man?' I rewrote it and added, And Freud spoils kids and spares the rod, to justify Man's ways toward God.'"
Crumley snorted. "Freud was a nut loose in a fruit patch. I always believed smart-ass punks need their teeth punched."
"My dad never broke my teeth."
"That's because you're a half-stale Christmas fruitcake, the kind no one eats."
"But Constance is beautiful?
"You mistake energy for beauty. Overseas, French girls knocked me flat. They blink, wave, dance, stand on their heads to prove they're alive. Hell, Constance is all battery acid and short circuit. If she ever slows down she'll get-"
"Ugly? No!"
"Gimme those!" He seized the glasses off my nose and peered through them.
"Rose— colored! How do things look without them?"
"Nothing's there."
"Great! There's not much worth seeing!"
"There's Paris in the spring. Paris in the rain. Paris on New Year's Eve."
"You been there?"
"I saw the movies. Paris. Gimme."
"I'll just keep these until you take waltz lessons from blind Henry." Crumley shoved my glasses in his pocket.
As we pulled our jalopy up on the shore in front of the white chateau, we saw two dark shapes by her oceanside pool, under the umbrella, to keep off the moonlight.
Crumley and I trudged up the dune and peered in at Blind Henry and angry Fritz Wong. There were martinis laid out on a tray.
"I knew," Henry said, "after that storm drain you'd seek refreshment. Grab. Drink."
We grabbed and drank.
Fritz soaked his monocle in vodka, thrust it in his stare, and said, "That's better!" And then he finished the drink.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I WENT 'round, placing camp chairs by the pool.
Crumley watched with a dour eye and said, "Let me guess. This is the finale of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, and Poirot's got all the usual suspects stashed poolside."
"Bull s— eye."
"Proceed."
I proceeded.
"This chair here is for the Mount Lowe collector of old newspapers."
"Who will testify in absentia?"
"In absentia. This next chair is for Queen Califia, long gone, with her palmistry and head bumps."
I kept moving. "Third chair: Father Rattigan. Fourth chair: Grauman's Chinese mile-high projectionist. Fifth chair: J. W. Bradford, a.k.a. Tallulah, Garbo, Swanson, Colbert. Sixth: Professor Quickly, a.k.a. Scrooge, Nicholas Nickleby, Richard the Third. Seventh chair: me. Eighth chair: Constance."
"Hold on."
Crumley got up and pinned his badge on my shirt.
"We going to sit here," said Fritz, "and listen to a fourth-rate Nancy Drew-"
"Stash your monocle," said Crumley.
Fritz stashed his monocle.
"Now," said Crumley, "junior?"
Junior moved behind the chairs.
"For starters, I'm Rattigan running in the rain with two Books of the Dead. Some already dead, some about to die."
I laid the two books on the glass-top table.
"We all know now that Quickly, in a spurt of nostalgic madness, sent the one book, with all the dead people, to frighten Constance. She came running from her past, her memories of a fast, furious, and destructive life."
"You can say that again," said Crumley.
I waited.
"Sorry," said Crumley.
I picked up the second book, Constance's more personal, recent phone lists.
"But what if Constance, hit by the old Book of the Dead, got wired back into her griefs, her losses in that past, and decided, in order to make do with it, she had to destroy it, person by person, one by one. What if she red-lined the names and forgot she had done it?"
"What if?" Crumley sighed.
"Let the idiot express his delight." Fritz Wong tucked his monocle back in his eye and leaned forward. "So the Ratti-gan goes to kill, maim, or at least threaten her own past, ja?" he said with heavy Germanic concern.
"Is that the way the next scene plays?" I asked.
"Action," said Fritz, amused.
I swayed behind the first empty chair.
"Here we are at the dead end of the old trolley-tram line on Mount Lowe."
Fritz and Crumley nodded, seeing the mummy there, wrapped in headlines.
"Wait." Blind Henry squinted. "Okay, I'm there."
"Her first husband is there, her first big mistake. So she goes up to swipe the newspapers with all her old selves filed away. She grabs the papers, like I did, and gives a final yell. Whether she pushed the landslide of newsprint, or gave one last shriek, who knows? Regardless, the Mount Lowe trolley master drowned in a bad-news avalanche. Okay?"
I looked over at Crumley, whose mouth gaped with his "okay." He nodded, as did Fritz. Henry sensed this and gave the go-ahead.
"Chair number two. Bunker Hill. Queen Califia. Predictor of futures, insurer of fates."
I held on to the chair as if I pushed that massive elephant on roller skates.
"Constance shouted outside her door. Califia wasn't murdered any more than that Mount Lowe Egyptian relic was. Yelled at, sure, by Rattigan, telling Califia to take back all her lousy predictions that insured the future. Califia had unrolled a papyrus road map, Constance followed, blind as a bat-sorry, Henry-all enthusiasm. Would Califia lie? No! Was the future wondrous? You betcha! Now, late in the game, Constance wanted retractions. Califia would have retracted, told new lies, and gone on living, but alarmed, fell downstairs into her grave. Not murder, but panic."
"So much for Califia," said Crumley, trying to hide his approval.
"Scene three, take one," said Fritz.
"Scene three, take one, chair number three." I moved. "This here is the confessional booth, St. Vibiana's."
Fritz scooched his chair closer, his monocle a lighthouse flash, searching my small private stage. He chopped his head at me to continue.
"And here's Rattigan's bighearted brother, trying to lead her along the straight and narrow. When Califia said 'left,' he yelled 'right,' and maybe after years of storms of brutal sin, he threw up his hands, tossed her out of the church. But she came back, raving, demanding absolution, screaming her demands, purify me, forgive me, your own flesh, give way, give in, but he clapped his hands over his ears and yelled against her yell, and his yells, not hers, struck him dead."
"So you say," said Fritz, one eye shut, the fire from his monocle stabbing. "Prove it. If we're going to shoot this like a goddamn film, write me the moment of truth. Tell how you know the priest killed himself with his own rage, yes?"
"Who the hell's the detective here?" Crumley cut in.
"The boy wonder is," drawled Fritz, not looking at him, still shooting lightning bolts of optical glass at me. "He gets hired or fired by what he next claims."
"I'm not applying for a job," I said.
"You've already got it," said Fritz. "Or get thrown out on your ass. I'm the studio head and you're plea-bargaining. How do you know the priest was self-murdered?"
I exhaled.
"Because I heard him breathe, watched his face, saw him run. He couldn't stand Constance diving in the surf one way, to come out another. She was hot desert air, he was fog. Collision. Lightning. Bodies."
"All from one priest and one bad sister?"
"Saint. Sinner," I said.
Fritz Wong stiffened with a glow in his face and a most ungodly smile.
"You got the job. Crumley?"
Crumley reared back from Fritz but at last nodded. "As proof? It'll do. Next?"
I moved on to the next chair.
"Here we are at Grauman's Chinese, up high, late night, film running, figures on the screen, pictures on the wall. All of Rattigan's former selves nailed, ready to be nabbed. And the one man who really knows her, bum to belly button, her dad, keeper of the unholy flame, but he doesn't want her either, so she busts in and swipes the pictures that prove her past. She's got to burn those, too, because she doesn't like all her former selves. The final bust-in puts her pa in shock, like all the rest. Torn both ways-after all, it is his daughter-he lets the pictures go but runs the film on a continuous roundabout reel, Molly, Dolly, Sally, Holly, Gala, Willa, Sue… The reel's still running and the faces lit when we arrive too late to save him or the swiped photos. Unmurder number four…"
"So J. Wellington Bradford a.k.a. Tallulah Bankhead cum Crawford cum Colbert is still alive, and he's not a victim?" said Crumley. "The same goes for quick-change artist Quickly?"
"Alive but not for long. They're as flimsy as kites in a long storm. Constance ranted at them-"
"Because?" said Crumley.
"They taught her all the ways to not be herself," said Fritz, proud of his insight. "Don't do this, do that, don't do that, do this. Richard the Third tells you how to be Lear's daughter, Lady Macbeth, Medea. One size fits all. So she became Electra, Juliet, Lady Godiva, Ophelia, Cleopatra. Bradford said. Rattigan did. Same with Quickly. See Connie run! She had to show up on both their doorsteps to disrobe, junk her lines, burn her notices. Can teachers unteach? Constance demanded. 'Who is Constance, what is she?' was the essence of her declaration. Being only forward teachers, they didn't know how to teach backward. So, Constance was driven to-"
"The basement dressing rooms," I said. "Snatch the pictures from upstairs, sure, but then wipe out the evidence of her former selves on the mirrors. Scrape, erase, eliminate, name by name, year by year."
I finished and sipped my drink and shut up.
"Is the train in Murder on the Orient Express pulling into the station?" said Fritz, lying back full-length like Caesar in his bath.
"Yes."
"Furthermore," said Fritz Wong in his fine Germanic guttural, "are you free to accept work on a screenplay titled The Many Deaths of Rattigan, starting Monday, five hundred a week, ten weeks, twenty thousand bonus if we finally shoot the goddamn film?"
"Take the money and run," said Henry.
"Crumley, you want me to take his offer?" I said.
"It's dumb thinking but a great film," said Crumley.
"You don't believe me?" I cried.
"Nobody could be as nuts as you just said," said Crumley.
"Good God, why have I stood here upchucking my guts?" I sank in my chair.
"I don't want to live," I said.
"Yes, you do." Fritz leaned forward, scribbling on a pad.
Five hundred a week was there.
He threw a five-dollar bill on top.
"Your first ten minutes' salary!"
"Then you almost believe? No." I pushed the paper away. "Got to be one of you here gets my idea."
"Me," a voice said.
We all looked at Blind Henry.
"Sign the contract," he said, "but make him sign saying he really believes every word you say!"
I hesitated, then scribbled my own manifesto.
Rumbling, Fritz signed.
"That Constance," he growled. "Damn! She shows up at your door, flings herself on you like a goddamn snake. Hell! Who cares if she kills herself? Why should she run scared of her own phone books and look up all the stupid people who led her down the garden path? Would phone books scare you? Christ, no! There had to be a reason for her setting out to run, to seek. Motivation. Why, goddammit, why all that work, to get what? Hold on."
Fritz stopped, his face suddenly pale, then slowly suffusing with color. "No. Yes. No, couldn't be. No. Yes. Is!"
"Is what, Fritz?"
"I'm glad I talk to myself," said Fritz. "I'm glad I listen. Did anyone hear?"
"You haven't said, Fritz."
"I'll talk to myself, and you eavesdrop, ja?"
"Ja," I said.
Fritz shot me through the heart with one glare. He doused his irritation with a swallow of his martini and said, "A month ago, two months, she threw herself across my desk, with heavy breaths. Was it true, she cried, I was starting some new film? A movie yet nameless? 'Ja,' I said. 'Yes, maybe.' And is there a part for me?' she said, on my shoulder, in my lap. 'No, no,' I said. 'Yes, there must be. There has to be. Tell me, Fritz, what is it?' I should have never told her. But I did, God help me!"
"What was the film, Fritz?"
"'What I'm planning is beyond you,' I said."
"Yes, but for God's sake, Fritz. Name the film!"
Fritz ignored me, staring through that monocle into the starry sky, still talking to himself while we eavesdropped.
"'You can't do it,' I said. She wept. 'Please,' she begged. ' Try me.' I said, 'Constance, it's something you can never be, something you never were.'" Fritz took another swig from his glass. "The Maid of Orleans."
"Joan of Arc!"
"'Oh, my God,' she cried. 'Joan! If it's the only thing I ever do, I must do that!'"
Must do that! came the echo.
Joan!
A voice cried in my ears. Rain fell. Water ran.
A dozen lighters took fire and were thrust out toward the sad, weeping woman.
"Only for my voices, I would lose all heart! The bells came down from heaven and their echoes linger in the fields. Through the quiet of the countryside, my voices!"
The subterranean audience gasped with: Joan.
Joan of Arc.
"Ohmigod, Fritz," I cried. "Say that again!"
"Saint Joan?"
I leaped back, my chair fell.
Fritz went on: "I said, 'Constance, it's too late.' She said, 'It's never too late.' And I said, 'Listen, I'll give you a test. If you pass, if you can do the scene from Shaw's Saint Joan… impossible, but if you can, you get the job.' She fell apart. She cried, 'Wait! I'm dying! Wait, I'll be back.' And she ran away."
I said, "Fritz, do you know what you've just said?"
"Gottdammit, yes! Saint Joan!"
"Oh, Christ, Fritz, don't you see? We've been thrown off by what she said to Father Rattigan. 'I've killed, I've murdered! Help me bury them,' she cried. We thought she meant old Rattigan up on Mount Lowe, Queen Califia on Bunker Hill, but no, dammit, she didn't murder them, she was out to get help to murder Constance!"
"How's that again?" said Crumley.
'"Help me kill Constance,' said Constance. Why? For Joan of Arc! That's the answer. She has to have that role. All this month she's been preparing for it. Isn't that it, Fritz?"
"Just a moment while I take my monocle out and put it back in." Fritz stared at me.
"Fritz, look! She's not right for the part. But there is one way she can be Saint Joan!"
"Dammit to hell, say it!"
"Dammit, Fritz, she had to get away from you, fall back, take a long, hard look at her life. She had to, one by one, kill all her selves, lay all the ghosts, so that when all those Constances were dead, she could come for her test, and maybe, just maybe, land the part. She hasn't had a role like that ever in her life. This was her big chance. And the only way she could do it was to kill the past. Don't you see, Fritz? That must be the answer to what's been going on during the last week, with all these people, with Constance appearing, disappearing, and reappearing again."
Fritz said, "No, no!"
I said, "Yes, yes. The answer's been lying right in front of us, but it's only when you said the name. Saint Joan is the motive for every woman who ever lived. Impossible dream. Can't be attained."
"I'll be gottdammed."
"Oh, no, Fritz!" I said. "Blessed! You've solved it! Now, if we find Constance and say to her, maybe, just maybe, she has a chance. Maybe, maybe-" I broke off. "Fritz," I said. "Answer me."
"What?"
"If Constance should suddenly appear as the Maid of Orleans, if she were incredibly young, changed in some strange way, would you give her the job?"
Fritz scowled. "Don't push me, dammit!"
I said, "I'm not. Look. Was there ever a time when she could have played the Maid?"
"Yes," he said after a moment. "But that was then and this is now!"
"Hear me out. What if, by some miracle, she should show up? When you think of her, just standing there, don't think of her past at all. When you remember the woman you once knew, if she asked, would you give her the role?"
Fritz pondered, took his glass, downed it, refilled it from a frosted crystal pitcher, and then said, "God help me, I think I might. Don't press me, don't press!"
"Fritz," I said, "if we could find that Constance and she asked you, would you at least consider taking a chance on her?"
"Oh, God," Fritz rumbled. "Jesus! Yes! No! I don't know!"
"Fritz!"
"Don't yell, goddammit! Yes! A qualified yes!"
"Okay! All right! Wonderful! Now, if only-"
My eyes strayed, scanning the length of shore to the distant storm-drain entrance. Too late, I glanced away.
Both Crumley and Fritz had caught the look.
"Junior knows where Medea is, right now," said Crumley.
Yes, God, I thought, I know! But my yell had scared her away!
Fritz focused his monocle on that storm-drain entrance.
"Is that where you came out?" he said.
"No thanks to junior here," said Crumley.
"I rode shotgun," I said guiltily.
"Like hell! Shouldn't have been in that sinkhole to start with. Probably found Rattigan, then lost her again."
Probably! I thought. Oh, God, probably!
"That storm drain," Fritz Wong mused. "Maybe, just maybe, you ran the wrong way?"
"I what?" I said, stunned.
"Here in crazy Hollywood," said Fritz, "is there not more than one way to go? The storm drains, they head in all directions?"
"South, north, west, and-" I slowed down. "East," I said slowly. It's not easy to say "east" slowly, but I did.
"East!" Fritz cried. "Ja, east, east!"
We let our thoughts roam over the hills and down toward Glendale. No one ever went to Glendale, except…
If someone was dead.
Fritz Wong twisted his monocle in his fierce right eye and probed the eastern skyline, smiling a wonderfully vicious smile.
"Gottdamn!" he said. "This will make the great finale. No script needed. Shall I tell you where Rattigan is? East! Gone to earth!"
"Gone to what*. " said Crumley.
"Sly fox, swift cat. Rattigan. Gone to earth. Tired, ashamed of all her lives! Hide them all in one final Cleopatra's carpet, roll them up, deposit them in Eternity's bank. Fade out. Darkness. Plenty of earth there to go to."
He made us wait.
"Forest Lawn," he said.
"Fritz, that's where they bury people!"
"Who's directing this?" Fritz said. "You took the wrong turn toward open air, the sea, life. Rattigan headed east. Death called her by all two dozen names. She answered with one voice."
"BS!" said Crumley.
"You're fired," said Fritz.
"I was never hired," said Crumley. "What's next?"
"Go and prove I am right!" said Fritz.
"So," said Crumley. "Rattigan climbed down into that storm drain and walked east, or drove, or was driven east?"
"That," said Fritz, "is how I would shoot it. Film! Delii" cious!
"But why would she go to Forest Lawn?" I protested weakly, thinking perhaps I had sent her there.
"To die!" said Fritz triumphantly. "Go read Ludwig Bemelmans' tale of the old man, dead, put a lit candle on his head, hung flowers around his neck, and walked, a one-man funeral, to his own grave! Constance, she does the same. She's gone to die a last time, yes? Now, do I put my car in gear? Will someone follow? And do we go aboveground or take the storm drain direct?"
I looked at Crumley, he looked at me, and we both looked at Blind Henry. He felt our gaze, nodded.
Fritz was already gone, the vodka with him.
"Lead the way," said Henry. "Swear a little now and then to give me direction."
Crumley and I headed for Crumley's old jalopy, Henry in our wake.
Fritz, in his car ahead, banged his motor, blew his horn.
"Okay, you damn Kraut!" cried Crumley.
He thrummed his engine, exploding.
"Which way to the nearest road rage, dammit?"
We paused by the storm drain, stared in, then out at the open road.
"Which is it, smart-ass?" said Crumley. "Dante's Inferno or Route 66?"
"Let me think," I said.
"Oh, no you don't!" Crumley cried.
Fritz was gone. We looked along the beach and couldn't see his car anywhere.
We looked to our right. There, speeding off down the tunnel, were two red lights. "Christ!" Crumley yelled. "He's heading in on the flood channel! Damned fool!"
"What are we going to do?" I said.
"Nothing," cried Crumley. "Just this!" He rammed the gas. We swerved and plunged into the tunnel.
"Madness!" I cried.
"Damn tootin'," said Crumley. "Goddamn!"
"I'm glad I can't see this," Henry said from the backseat, speaking to the wind in his face.
We raced up the flood channel, heading inland.
"Can we do it?" I cried. "How high is the flood channel?"
"Most places it's ten feet high," Crumley shouted. "The farther in we get, the higher the ceilings. Floods come down the mountains in Glendale, then the channel has to be really big to take the flood. Hold on!"
Ahead of us, Fritz's car had almost vanished. "Idiot!" I said. "Does he really know where he's going?"
"Yes!" said Crumley. "All the way to Grauman's Chinese then left to the goddamn marble orchard."
The sound of our motor was shattering. In that thunder we saw ahead of us a tide of those lunatics who had assaulted me. "My God," I cried. "We'll hit them! Don't slow down! Those crazies! Keep going!"
We raced along the channel. Our engine roared. The history of LA. streamed past us on the walls: pictographs, graffiti, crazed illustrations left by wandering homeless in 1940, 1930, 1925, faces and images of terrible things and nothing alive.
Crumley floored the gas. We plunged at the crazed underground mob who shrieked and screamed a horrible welcome. But Crumley didn't slow. We cut through them, tossed them aside.
One ghost rose up flailing, gibbering.
Ed, Edward, Eddie, oh Eduardo! I thought. Is that you?
"You never said good-bye!" the ghost raved and fell away.
I wept and we raced on, outpacing my guilt. We left all behind and the farther we went, the more terrified I became.
"How in hell do we know where we are?" I said. "There aren't any directions down here. Or we can't see them."
Crumley said, "I think that maybe, yeah, let's see." For there were signs on the walls, scribbled in chalk, some in black painted letters.
Crumley slowed the car. On the wall ahead of us someone had etched a bunch of crucifixes and cartoon tombstones.
Crumley said, "If Fritz is any guide, we're in Glendale."
"That means…" I said.
"Yeah," he said. "Forest Lawn."
He put on his high beams and swerved the car right and left as we moved slowly, and we saw a ladder leading up to a grate covered by a manhole in the tunnel ceiling and Fritz's car beneath it, and him out of the car and climbing the ladder. A series of crosses ran alongside the ladder leading up.
We got out of the car and crossed the dry wash and began to climb the ladder. There was a thundering clang above us. We saw Fritz's shape and the manhole shoved aside, and the beginnings of a gentle rain pelting his shoulders.
We climbed the ladder in silence. Above us, Fritz was directing and shouting. "Get the hell up here, you damn fools!"
We looked down.
Blind Henry was not about to be left behind.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
the storm was over but the drizzle stayed. The sky was a loon sky-promising much, delivering little.
"Are we there yet?" said Henry.
We all looked in the gates at Forest Lawn Cemetery, a sweeping hillside covered with a cannonade of memorial stones embedded like meteors in its grass.
"They say that place," said Crumley, "has a greater voting population than Paducah, Kentucky, Red River, Wyoming, or East End, Azusa."
"I like old-fashioned graveyards," said Henry. "Things you can run your hands over. Tombs you can lie on like statues or bring your lady in late hours to play doctor."
"Anyone ever gone in just to check the boy Davids fig leaf?" said Fritz.
"I hear tell," said Henry, "when they shipped him over, there was no leaf, so he lay around the north forty a year, under canvas, so old ladies in tennis shoes wouldn't be offended. Day before the fig leaf was glued on to spoil the fun, they had to beat off a gloveless Braille Institute convention. Live folks doing gymnastics in midnight graveyards is called foreplay. Dead folks doing the same is afterplay."
We stood there in the drizzle looking across the way to the mortuary offices.
"Gone to earth," I heard someone murmur. Me.
"Move!" said Crumley. "In thirty minutes the rain from the hills hits below. The flood will wash our cars down to the sea."
We stared at the gaping manhole. We could hear the creek whispering below.
"My God!" said Fritz. "My classic car!"
"Move!" said Crumley.
We ducked across the street and into the mortuary building.
"Who do we ask?" I said. "And what do we ask?"
There was a moment of colliding looks, pure confusion. "Do we ask for Constance?" I said.
"Talk sense," said Crumley. "We ask about all those newspaper headlines and names. All those lipstick aliases on the basement dressing-room mirrors."
"Say again," said Henry.
"I'm talking pure circumstantial metaphor," said Crumley. "Double time!"
We double-timed it into the vast halls of death, or to put it another way, the land of clerks and file cabinets.
We did not have to take a number and wait, for a very tall man with ice-blond hair and an oyster complexion glided to the front desk and disdained us as if we were discards from a steam laundry.
He laid a card on the desktop and dared Crumley to take it. "You Grey?" he said.
"Elihu Phillips Grey, as you see."
"We're here to buy gravesites and plots."
A late— winter smile appeared on Elihu P. Grey's mouth and hung there, like a mist. With a magician's gesture, he manifested a chart and price sheet.
Crumley ignored it. "First, I got a list."
He pulled out all the names I had put together but placed it upside down in front of Grey, who scanned the list in silence.
So Crumley pulled forth a rolled wad of one-hundred-dollar bills.
"Hold that, will you, junior?" he said, tossing the wad to me. And then, to Grey: "You know those names?"
"I know all the names." Grey relapsed into silence.
Crumley swore under his breath. "Recite them, junior."
I recited the names, one by one.
"Holly Morgan."
Grey flicked through his file.
"She's here. Buried 1924."
"Polly Starr?"
Another quick run-through.
"Here. 1926."
"How about Molly Circe?"
"Right. 1927."
"Emily Danse?"
"1928."
"All buried here, for sure?"
Grey looked sour. "I have never once in all my life been wrong. Strange, however." He rescanned the items he had drawn out of the file. "Odd. Are they all related, all one family?"
"How do you mean?"
Grey fixed his arctic stare at the names. "Because, see here, they're all entombed in the same aboveground Gothic stone hut."
"How's that again?" Crumley lurched from his boredom and grabbed the file cards. "What?"
"Odd, all those different surnames, put to rest in one tomb, a memorial dwelling with eight shelves for eight family members."
"But they aren't family!" said Fritz.
"Odd," said Grey. "Strange."
I stood as if struck by lightning.
"Hold on," I whispered.
Fritz and Crumley and Henry turned to me.
Grey lifted his snowy eyebrows. "Ye-e-ss." He made two long syllables out of it. "Well?"
"The tomb house? The family vault? There must be a name on the portico. The name chiseled in marble?"
Grey scanned his cards, making us wait.
"Rattigan," he said.
"Are you sure?"
"I have never-"
"Yes, I know! The name again!"
We all held our breath.
"Rattigan." His cold voice issued from a steel-trap mouth.
We let our air out.
At last I said, "They can't all be there in that one vault."
Grey shut his eyes. "I-"
"I know, I know," I said quickly. I stared at my friends.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Jesus Christ," murmured Crumley. "Goddamn. Can you give us directions to the Rattigan tomb?"
Grey scribbled on a notepad map. "Easy to find. There're fresh flowers out front. The tomb door is open. There will be a memorial service there tomorrow."
"Who's being entombed?"
We all waited, eyes shut, guessing the answer.
"Rattigan," said Grey, almost smiling. "Someone named Constance Rattigan."
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE rain was so thick the graveyard disappeared. All we could see as we drove uphill in an electric runabout were monuments on the side of the road. The path ahead vanished in the downpour. I carried a map on my lap, marked with an arrow and the name of the area. We stopped.
"It's there," said Crumley. "Azalia Gardens? Plot sixteen. Neo-Palladian edifice."
The rain blew back like a curtain and a flicker of lightning showed us a slender tomb with Palladian pillars on each side of a tall metal door, which stood ajar.
"So if she wants out," said Henry, "she's out. Or invite folks in. Rattigan!"
The rain lifted and blew away and the tomb waited while thunder ran along the far brim of the graveyard. The open door trembled.
Crumley spoke almost to himself: "Jesus! Constance buried herself. Name after name. Year after year. When she was done with one act, one face, one mask, she hired a tomb and stashed herself away. And now, to get the job, maybe, from Fritz, she's killing all her selves again. Don't go in there, Willie."
"She's in there now," I said.
"Horse apples," said Crumley. "Goddamn intuition?"
"No." I shivered. "Goddamn hunch. She's got to be saved." I climbed out.
"She's dead!"
"I'll save her anyway?
"Like hell you will!" said Crumley. "You're under arrest! Get back in here!"
"You're the law, sure, but you're my friend."
I was flooded with cold rain.
"Dammit, dammit all to hell. Go on! Run, you stupid idiot! We'll be waiting downhill. I'll be goddamned if I'll sit and watch your head come flying out that goddamn door. Come find us! Damn you!"
"Hold on!" Fritz cried.
"Hold goddamn nothing!"
Fritz threw a small flask that hit me in the chest.
I stood shivering in the cold downpour and gave Fritz a long look as Crumley, cursing, got out of the runabout slowly. We stood in the big mortuary field with an open iron gate and open tomb door and the rain threatening to wash the bodies out of the earth. I shut my eyes and drank the vodka.
"Ready or not," I whispered. "Here goes."
"Goddammit," said Crumley.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
it was a dark and stormy night.
My God, I thought, again?
Feet running. A cry. Lightning, thunder, a few nights back.
And here, my God, the same again!
The gates of heaven burst, a flood poured in darkness, with me near a cold tomb with someone crazed and maybe dead deep in the dark.
Stop, I told myself.
Touch.
The outer gate creaked. The inner door squealed.
We stood in the entry of the marble tomb with the sun gone, never to return, and the rain to rain forever.
It was dark, but there were three small blue votive candles lit and wavering in the draft from the door.
We all looked at the sarcophagus down below on our right.
Holly's name was there. But there was no lid on the sarcophagus and it was empty, save for a powdering of dust.
Our eyes looked up to the next shelf.
Lightning flickered outside in the rain. Thunder mumbled.
On the next shelf Molly's name was cut in marble. But again no lid, and the sarcophagus was empty.
Rain drenched the open door behind us as we looked at the next-to-top and topmost shelves and marble cases. We saw the names of Emily and Polly. We could see one was unoccupied. Trembling, I reached up to probe the top casement. My fingers touched only empty air.
Holly, Polly, Molly, and Emily, but in the flickers of lightning no bodies, no remains.
I stared up at that final enclosure and began to reach up when there was the faintest gasp and something like a cold weeping, far away.
I took my hand down and looked at Crumley. He looked up at the last sarcophagus and at last said, "Junior, it's all yours." There was a final intake of breath above in the shadows.
"Okay," said Crumley, "everyone out."
Everyone backed out into the whispering rain. At the door Crumley looked back at his lunatic child, handed me a flashlight, nodded good luck, and was gone.
I was alone.
I pulled back. The flashlight fell. I almost collapsed. It took a long while before I found and raised its beam, my heartbeat quaked with it.
"You," I whispered, "there."
Jesus, what did that mean?
"It's," I whispered, "me."
Louder.
"I came to find you," I whispered.
"So?" the shadow murmured. The rain behind me fell in a solid sheet. Lightning shimmered. But still no thunder.
"Constance," I said at last to the dark shape on the tall shelf with the shadows of rain curtaining it. "Listen."
And at last I said my name.
Silence.
I spoke again.
Oh God, I thought, she's really dead!
No more of this! Get out, damn, go! But even in turning, the slightest shrug, it happened. The shadow above with a faceless face quickened with the merest breath.
I hardly heard, I only sensed the shadow.
"What?" it exhaled.
I quickened, glad for life, any life, any pulse.
"My name." I gave it again.
"Oh," someone murmured.
Which hammered me to quicker life. I leaned away from rain into cold tomb air.
"I've come to save you," I whispered.
"So?" the voice murmured.
It was the merest mosquito dance in the air, not heard, no, not there. How could a dead woman speak?
"Good," the whisper said. "Night."
"Don't sleep!" I cried. "Sleep and you won't come back! Don't die."
"Why?" came the murmur.
"Because," I gasped. "Because. I say so."
"Say." A sigh.
Jesus, I thought, say something!
"Say!" said the faintest shadow.
"Come out!" I murmured. "This isn't your place!"
"Yes." The faintest brush of sound.
"No!" I cried.
"Mine," came the breath in the shadow.
"I'll help you get away," I said.
"From what?" the shadow said. And then, in terrible fear: "Gone. They are gone!"
"They?"
"Gone? They've got to be! Are they?"
Lightning struck the dark acres at last, thunder knocked the tomb. I spun to stare out at the meadows of stone, the hills of shining slabs with names being sluiced away. And the slabs and stones were lit by the fires in the sky and became names on mirror glass, photos on walls, inked names on papers, and again mirror names and dates being washed away down a storm drain while the pictures fell from the walls and the film slithered through the projector to dance faces on a silver screen ten thousand miles below. Pictures, mirrors, films. Films, mirrors, pictures. Names, dates, names.
"Are they still there?" said the shadow on the top shelf of the tomb.
"Out there in the rain?"
I looked out at the long hill of the mortuary place. The rain was falling on a dozen and a hundred and a thousand stones.
"They mustn't be there," she said. "I thought they were gone forever. But then they began to knock at the door, wake me. I swam out to my friends, the seals. But no matter how far I swam, they were waiting for me on the shore. The whisperers who want to remember what I want to forget."
She hesitated. "So if I couldn't outrun them, I'd have to kill them one by one, one by one. Who were they? Me? So I chased them instead of them me, and one by one I found where they were buried and buried them again. 1925, then 1928, 1930, '35. Where they would stay forever. Now it's time to lie down and sleep forever, or they might call me again at three in the morning. So, where am I?
The rain fell outside the crypt. There was a long moment of silence and I said, "You're here, Constance, and I'm here, listening."
After a while she said, "Are they all gone, is the shore clear now, can I swim back in and not be afraid?"
I said, "Yes, Constance, they're really buried. You did the job. Someone had to forgive you, that someone had to be Constance. Come out."
"Why?" said the voice from the top shelf of the tomb.
"Because," I said, "this is all crazy, but you're needed. So, please, rest for a moment, and then put your hand out and let me help you down. Do you hear me, Constance?"
The sky went dark. The fires died. The rain fell, erasing the stones and slabs and the names, the names, the terrible names cut to last but dissolving in grass.
"Are they?" came the frantic whisper.
And I said, my eyes filled with cold rain, "Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes," I said. "The yard's empty. The picture's dropped. The mirrors are clean. Now there's only you and me."
The rain washed the unseen stones sinking deep in the flooded grass.
"Come out," I said quietly.
Rain fell. Water slid on the road. The monuments, stones, slabs, and names were lost.
"Constance, one final thing."
"What?" she whispered.
After a long pause I said, "Fritz Wong is waiting. The screenplay is finished. The sets are built and ready."
I shut my eyes and agonized to remember.
Then, at last, I remembered: " 'Only for my voices, I would lose all heart.' "
I hesitated, then continued: " 'It is in the bells I hear my voices. The bells come down from heaven and the echoes linger. In the quiet of the countryside, my voices are there. Without them I would lose heart.' "
Silence.
A shadow moved. A white shape motioned.
The tips of her fingers came out into the shadows and then her hand and then the slender arm.
Then, after a long silence, a deep breath, an exhalation, Constance said: "I'm coming down."
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE storm was gone. It was as if it had never been. The sky was clean, not a cloud anywhere, and a fresh breeze was blowing as if to clean a slate, or a mirror, or a mind.
I stood on the beach in front of Rattigan's Arabian fort with Crumley and Henry, mostly silent, and Fritz Wong surveying the scene for long shots and close-ups.
Inside the house two men in white coveralls moved like shadows and I was put in mind of altar attendants somehow, the mind of a crazed writer freely associating, and I wished that somehow, wild as it seemed, Father Rattigan could be there, could be one of those white figures cleaning the house with a censer of incense and a rain of holy water, to re-sanctify a place that had probably never been anywhere near sanctified. Good God, I thought, bring a priest to cleanse a den of iniquity! The housepainters, inside, scraping the walls clean in order to apply fresh paint, worked steadily, not knowing whose house it was and what had lived there. Outside on a table by the pool were some beers for Crumley, Fritz, Henry, and myself, and vodka, if our mood changed.
The smell of fresh paint was invigorating; it promised a lunatic redemption, and an echo of forgiveness. New paint, new life? Please, God.
"How far out does she go?" Crumley stared at the breakers a hundred yards off shore.
"Don't ask me," said Henry.
"Out with the seals," I said, "or sometimes in close. She has a lot of friends out there. Hear?"
The seals were barking, louder or softer I couldn't say, I only heard. It was a glad sound to go with the fresh paint in an old house made new.
"Tell the painters when they paint her mailbox," said Fritz, "to leave room for just one name, ja?"
"Right," said Henry. He cocked his head to one side, and then frowned. "She's been swimming a long time. What if she don't come in?"
"That wouldn't be so bad," I said. "She loves the water offshore."
"Swells after a storm, fine for surfing. Hey! That was loud!"
The kind of loud that made for a theatrical entrance.
With superb timing, a cab roared up in the alley behind Rattigan's.
"God!" I said. "I know who that is!"
A door slammed. A woman came slogging across the sand that ran between the house and seaside pool, her hands clenched in tight balls. She stood before me like a blast furnace and raised her fists.
"What have you got to say for yourself?" Maggie cried.
"Sorry?" I bleated.
"Sorry!"
She hauled off and struck me a terrible blow on the nose.
"Hit him again," Crumley suggested.
"Once more for luck," offered Fritz.
"What's going on?" said Henry.
"Bastard!"
"I know."
"Son of a bitch!"
"Yes," I said.
She struck a second time.
The blood gushed. It flooded my chin and drenched my upraised hands. Maggie pulled back.
"Oh, God," she cried, "what have I done!"
"Hit a son of a bitch and bastard," Fritz answered.
"Right," said Crumley.
"You keep out of this!" Maggie yelled. "Someone get a Band-Aid."
I looked at the bright flow on my hands. "Band-Aids won't work."
"Shut up, you stupid womanizer!"
"Only one" I bleated.
"Hold still!" she cried, and raised her fist again.
I held still and she collapsed.
"No, no, enough, enough," she wept. "Oh God, this is terrible."
"Go ahead, I deserve it," I said.
"Do you, do you?"
"Yeah," I said.
Maggie glared at the far surf. "Where is she? Out there?"
"Somewhere."
"I hope she never comes in!"
"Me, too."
"What in hell does that mean?"
"I don't know," I said as quietly as possible. "Maybe she belongs out there. Maybe she has friends, dumb friends, and maybe she should stay with them and never come in again."
"If she does, I'll kill her."
"Then she's better off staying way out."
"Are you defending her, damn you?"
"No, just saying she should never have come in. She was always happier on days like this, after a storm, when the waves are right and the clouds are gone. I saw her a few times like that. She didn't drink all day, just kept going out, and there was always the promise she wouldn't come back."
"What got into you? What got into her?"
"Nobody knows. It happens all the time. No alibis. It's just things happen, and next thing you know it's all gone to hell."
"Keep talking, maybe you'll make sense."
"No, the more talk the less sense. She was lost for a long time. Now, maybe, she's found. A lot of bull, a lot of malarkey, I don't know. I promised her if she swam out with all those names, she might swim back in as just one. Promises, promises. We'll know when she comes ashore."
"Shut up. You know I love you, don't you, you dumb bastard?"
"I know."
"In spite of all this, you rat, I still love you, God help me. Is this what all women put up with?"
"Most," I said. "Most. No explanations. No reason. Awful truths. The dog wanders. The dog comes home. The dog smiles. You hit him. He forgives you for forgiving him. And it's back home to the kennel or a lonely life. I don't want a lonely life. Do you?"
"Jesus help me, no I don't. Wipe your nose."
I wiped it. More blood.
"I'm sorry," she cried.
"Don't be. That's the last thing for you to be. Don't."
"Hold it!" said Henry. "Listen."
"What?" said everyone at once.
"Feel it?" said Henry.
"What, what, dammit?"
"The big surf, the biggest wave, coming in, now," murmured Henry. "And bringing something with it."
Way out, the seals barked.
Way out, a huge wave curled.
Crumley, Fritz, Henry, Maggie, and I held our breath.
And the wave came in.