A Graveyard for Lunatics (12 page)

I parked my bike out in front of his small thornbush-hidden safari bungalow a mile from the ocean and walked up through a grove of African lilacs, along a path dusted, you felt, by okapi beasts just yesterday.

As I raised my hand to knock, the door blew open.

A fist came out of the darkness with a foaming beer can in it. I could not see the man who held it. I snatched it away. The hand vanished. I heard footsteps fade through the house.

I took three sips to get strength to enter.

The house was empty.

The garden was not.

Elmo Crumley sat under a thornbush tree, wearing his banana trader’s hat, eying the beer that he held in his sunburnt hand, and drinking silently.

There was an extension telephone on a rattan table at his elbow. Looking steadily, wearily at me from under his white hunter’s topee, Crumley dialed a number.

Someone answered. Crumley said: “One more migraine. Putting in for sick leave. See you in three days, okay? Okay.” And hung up.

“I guess,” I said, “that headache is me.”

“Any time you show up… seventy-two hours’ leave.”

He nodded. I sat. He went to stand at the rim of his own private jungle, where the elephants trumpeted and unseen flights of giant bumblebees, hummingbirds, and flamingos died long before any future ecologists declared them dead.

“Where,” said Crumley, “the hell have you
been
?”

“Married,” I said.

Crumley thought it over, snorted, strolled over, put his arm around my shoulder, and kissed me on the top of my head.

“Accepted!”

And laughing, he went to drag out a whole case of beer.

We sat eating hotdogs in the little rattan gazebo at the back of his garden.

“Okay, son,” he said, finally. “Your old dad has missed you. But a young man between blankets has no ears. Old Japanese proverb. I knew you’d come back someday.”

“Do you forgive me?” I said, welling over.

“Friends don’t forgive, they forget. Swab your throat out with this. Is Peg a great wife?”

“Been married a year and yet to have our first fight over money.” I blushed. “She makes most of it. But my studio salary is up—one hundred fifty a week.”

“Hell! That’s ten bucks more than
I
make!”

“
Only
for six weeks. I’ll soon be back writing for
Dime Mystery
.”

“And writing beauts. I’ve kept up in spite of the silence—”

“You get the Father’s Day card I sent?” I said quickly.

He ducked his head and beamed. “Yeah. Hell.” He straightened up. “But more than familial emotions brought you here,
right
?”

“People are dying, Crumley.”

“Not again!” he cried.

“Well, almost dying,” I said. “Or have come back from the grave not really alive, but papier-mache dummies—”

“Hold ‘er, Newt!” Crumley darted into the house and ran back with a flask of gin, which he poured into his beer as I talked faster. The sprinkler system came on in his Kenya tropical backyard, along with the cries of veldt animals and deep-jungle birds. At last I was finished with all the hours from Halloween to now. I fell silent.

Crumley let out a grievous sigh. “So Roy Holdstrom’s fired for making a clay bust. Was the Beast’s face
that
awful?”

“Yes!”

“Aesthetics. This old gumshoe can’t help with that!”

“You got to. Right now Roy is still
in
the studio, waiting for a chance to sneak all of his prehistoric models out. They’re worth thousands. But Roy’s there illegally. Can you help me figure out what in hell this all
means
? Help Roy get his job back?”

“Jesus,” sighed Crumley.

“Yeah,” I said. “If they catch Roy trying to move things out, lord God!”

“Damn,” said Crumley. He added more gin to his beer. “You know who that guy was in the Brown Derby?”

“No.”

“You got any notions about anyone who
might
know?”

“The priest at St. Sebastian’s.”

I told Crumley about the midnight confession, the voice speaking, the weeping, and the quiet response of the church father.

“No good. No way.” Crumley shook his head. “Priests don’t know or don’t give names. If I went in, asking, I’d be out on my ass in two minutes. Next.”

“The maitre d’ at the Derby might. And he was recognized by someone outside the Derby that night. Someone I knew when I was a kid hanging out on my roller skates. Clarence. I’ve been asking around for his last name.”

“Keep asking. If he knows who the Beast is, we’d have something to go on. Christ, it’s dumb. Roy fired, you tossed into a new job, all from a clay bust. Overreaction. Riots. And how come all that uproar about a dummy on a ladder?”

“Exactly.”

“And I thought,” sighed Crumley, “when I saw you standing in the door, I was going to be happy that you came back into my life.”

“
Aren’t
you?”

“No, dammit.” He softened his voice. “Yeah, hell. But I sure wish you’d left that pile of horse manure outside.”

He squinted at the rising moon over his garden and said: “Boy oh boy… You sure got me
curious
.” And added: “Smells like blackmail!”

“Blackmail!?”

“Why go to all the trouble of writing notes, provoking innocents like you and Roy, propping fakes up on ladders, getting you to reproduce a Creature, if it didn’t
lead
somewhere? What’s the use of a panic if you don’t cash in on it. There must be more notes, more letters, right?”

“I saw none.”

“Yeah, but you were the tool, the means, to get things stirred. You didn’t spill the beans. Someone else did. I bet there’s a blackmail note out there somewhere tonight, says: ‘Two hundred thousand in unmarked fifties will buy you no more reborn corpses on walls.’ So… tell me about the studio,” Crumley said, at last.

“Maximus? Most successful studio in history. Still is.
Variety
headlined their profit last month. Forty million net. No other studio near.”

“Those
honest
figures?”

“Deduct five million, you’ve still got a studio rich as hell.”

“Any big problems, recently, ruckuses, upheavals, troubles? You know, any other people fired, films canceled?”

“It’s been steady on and quiet for months.”

“Then that must be it. The profits! I mean. Everything going along nice and easy and then something happens, doesn’t look like much, scares everybody. Someone thinks, my God,
one man on a wall
, there goes the neighborhood! Got to be something under the carpet somewhere, something buried—” Crumley laughed. “Buried is right. Arbuthnot? You think someone dug up some old really dirty scandal that nobody ever even heard of, and is threatening the studio, not very subtly, with releasing the dirt?”

“What kind of scandal, twenty years old, could make a studio think it was going to be destroyed if it was revealed?”

“If we wade in the sewer long enough we’ll know. Trouble is, sewer-hopping was never my hobby. Was Arbuthnot, alive, clean?”

“Compared to other studio heads? Sure. He was single and had girlfriends, but you expect that of any bachelor, and they were all nice Santa Barbara horsewomen,
Town and Country
types, handsome and bright, showered twice a day. No dirt.”

Crumley sighed again, as if someone had dealt him the wrong cards and he was ready to fold his hand and fade. “What about that car crash Arbuthnot was in? Was it an accident?”

“I saw the news photos.”

“Photos, hell!” Crumley looked out at his homemade jungle and checked the shadows. “What if the accident
wasn’t
an accident? What if it was, well, manslaughter. What if everyone was dead drunk and then dead?”

“They had just come from a big liquor bash at the studio. That much got in the papers.”

“Try this,” mused Crumley. “Studio bigwig, rich as Croesus, with all-time grosses for Maximus, out of his mind with hooch, playing chicken with the other car, driven by Sloane, ricochets off him and everyone hits the telephone pole. That’s not the kind of news you want front-paged. Stock markets dive. Investors vanish. Films die. The silver-haired boy falls off his pedestal, et cetera, et cetera, so there’s a coverup. Now, late in time, someone who was there, or uncovered the facts this year, is shaking down the studio, threatening to tell more than photos and skid-marks. Or what if—?”

“What if?”

“It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t horse-around drunkenness that slammed them to hell. What if someone did it to them on purpose?”

“Murder!?” I said.

“Why not? Studio heads that tall, that big, that wide, make lots of enemies. All the yes-men around them eventually think rat crap and malice. Who was next in line for power at Maximus that year?”

“Manny Leiber? But he wouldn’t kill a fly. He’s all hot air!”

“Give him the benefit of one fly and one hot air balloon. He’s the studio head now, right? Well! A couple of slashed tires, some loosened bolts, and bang! the whole studio falls in your lap for a lifetime!”

“That all sounds logical.”

“But if we could find the guy that did it, he’d prove it
for
us. Okay, buster, what next?”

“I suppose we check the old local newspapers from twenty years ago to see what’s missing. And if you could kind of prowl around the studio. Unobtrusively, that is.”

“With these flat feet? I think I know the studio gate guard. Worked at Metro years ago. He’d let me in and zip his lip. What else?”

I gave him a list. The carpenters’ shop. The graveyard wall. And the Green Town house where Roy and I had
planned
to work, and where Roy might be now.

“Roy’s still there, waiting to steal back his beasts. And, Crum, if what you say is true, night chicken rides, manslaughter, murder, we got to blow Roy out of there now. If the studio people go in Stage 13 tonight and find the box in which Roy hid that papier-mache body after he stole it, what
won’t
they do to him?!”

Crumley grunted. “You’re asking me to not only get Roy re-hired but help him stay alive, right?”

“Don’t say that!”

“Why not? You’re all over the ball field, playing pitcher and running to bat flies and fumble balls. How in hell do I catch Roy? Wander around the sets with a butterfly net and some cat food! Your studio friends know Roy,
I
don’t. They can stomp him long before I get out of the bull pen. Give me just
one
fact to start with!”

“The Beast. If we found out who
he
is, we might find why Roy was fired for making that clay bust.”

“Yeah, yeah. What else? About the Beast—”

“We saw him go into the graveyard. Roy followed him, but wouldn’t tell me what he saw, what the Beast was up to. Maybe, maybe it was the Beast put that papier-mache duplicate of Arbuthnot up on the graveyard wall—and sent notes to blackmail people!”

“Now you’re cooking!” Crumley rubbed his bald head with both hands, rapidly. “Identify the Beast, ask where he borrowed the ladder and how he made the look-alike Arbuthnot papier-mache corpse! Well!
well
!” Crumley beamed.

He ran to the kitchen for more beer.

We drank and he gazed at me with paternal affection. “I was just thinking… how great it is to have you home.”

I said, “Hell, I haven’t even asked you about your novel—”

“Downwind from Death?”

“
That’s
not the title I gave you!”

“Your title was too good. I’m giving it back.
Downwind from Death
will be published next week.”

I leaped to grab Crumley’s hands.

“Crumb!! Oh, God! You
did
it! You got some
champagne
?!”

We both peered in his icebox.

“If you churn beer and gin in a Waring blender, is
that
champagne?”

“Why not
try
?”

We tried.

And the phone rang.

“It’s for you,” said Crumley.

“Thank God!” I grabbed the phone. “Roy!”

Roy said, “I don’t want to live. Oh, God, this is terrible. Get over here before I go mad. Stage 13!”

And he was gone.

“Crumley!” I said.

Crumley led me out to his car.

We rode across town. I couldn’t get my teeth unclenched to speak. I held so hard to my knees that the circulation ran dead.

At the studio gate I told Crumley, “Don’t wait. I’ll call in an hour and let you know…”

I walked away and bumped into the gate. I found a phone booth near Stage 13 and ordered a taxi to wait outside Stage 9, a good one hundred yards away. Then I walked through the doors of Stage 13.

I stepped into darkness and chaos.

I saw ten dozen things which were a devastation to my soul.

Nearby, the masks, skulls, jackstraw legbones, floating ribs, skull faces of the Phantom had been uprooted and hurled across the stage in frenzies.

Further over, a war, an annihilation, had just fallen in its own dusts.

Roy’s spider towns and beetle cities were trodden into the earth. His beasts had been eviscerated, decapitated, blasted, and buried in their own plastic flesh.

I advanced through ruins, scattered as if a night bombing had rained utter destruction upon the miniature roofs, turrets and Lilliputian figurines. Rome had been smashed by a gargantuan Attila. The great library at Alexandria was not burned; its tiny leaflet books, like the wings of hummingbirds, lay in drifts across the dunes. Paris smoldered. London was disemboweled. A giant Napoleon had stomped Moscow flat forever. In sum, five years’ work, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, had been wasted in, what? Five minutes!

Roy! I thought, you must never see this!

But he had.

As I advanced across the lost battlefields and strewn villages I saw a shadow on the far wall.

It was a shadow from the motion picture
The Phantom of the Opera
when I was five. In that film some ballerinas, backstage, twirling, had frozen, stared, shrieked, and fled. For there, hung like a sandbag from the flies, they saw the body of the night watchman, slowly swaying, high in the stage flies. The memory of that film, that scene, the ballerinas, the dead man hung high in shadows, had never left me. And now, at the far north side of this sound stage, an object drifted on a long spider line. It shed an immense, twenty-foot darkness on the empty wall, like a scene from that old and frightening picture.