A Graveyard for Lunatics (16 page)

“Damn you! Go inside,” she said. “Get the vodka.”

I brought the vodka and a glass. I watched her throw back two slugs. I was suddenly sober forever, tired of seeing people drink, tired of being afraid when night came.

I could think of nothing to say so I went to the edge of her pool, took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants, and soaked my feet in the water, looking down, waiting.

At last Constance came and sat beside me.

“You’re back,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Old memories die hard.”

“They sure as hell do,” I said, looking along the coastline now myself. “At the studio this week, panic attacks. Why would everyone fly apart at a wax dummy in the rain that looked like Arbuthnot?”

“Is
that
what happened?”

I told her the rest, as I had told it to Crumley, ending with the Brown Derby and my need for her to go there with me. When I finished, Constance, paler, finished one more vodka.

“I wish I knew what I’m supposed to be scared about!” I said. “Who wrote that note to get me to the graveyard, so I’d introduce a fake Arbuthnot to a waiting world. But I didn’t tell the studio I found the dummy, so
they
found and tried to hide it, almost wild with fear. Is the memory of Arbuthnot that terrible so long after his death?”

“Yes.” Constance put her trembling hand on my wrist. “Oh, yes.”

“Now what? Blackmail? Does someone write Manny Leiber and demand money or more notes will reveal the studio’s past, Arbuthnot’s life? Reveal what? A lost reel of film maybe from twenty years ago, on the night Arbuthnot died. Film at the scene of the accident, maybe, which, if shown, would burn Constantinople, Tokyo, Berlin, and the whole backlot?”

“Yes!” Constance’s voice was far back in some other year. “Get out now. Run. Did you ever dream a big black two-ton bulldog comes in the night and eats you up? A friend of mine had that dream. The big black bulldog ate him. We called it World War II. He’s gone forever. I don’t want
you
gone.”

“Constance, I can’t quit. If Roy’s alive—”

“You don’t
know
that.”

“—and I get him out of there and help him get his job back because it’s the only right thing to do. I got to. It’s all so unfair.”

“Go out in the water, argue with the sharks, you’ll get a better deal. You really want to go back to Maximus studios after what you just told me? God. Do you know the
last
day I was ever there? The afternoon of Arbuthnot’s funeral.”

She let that sink me. Then she threw the anchor after it.

“It was the end of the world. I never saw so many sick and dying people in one place. It was like watching the Statue of Liberty crack and fall. Hell. He was Mount Rushmore after an earthquake. Forty times bigger, stronger, greater than Cohn, Zanuck, Warner, and Thalberg rolled in one knish. When they slammed his casket lid in that tomb across the wall, cracks ran all the way uphill to where the Hollywoodland sign fell. It was Roosevelt, dying long before his death.”

Constance stopped for she could hear my uneasy breathing.

Then she said: “Look, is there a brain in my head? Did you know Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day? Think! It’s all the redwoods in the world cut so the thunder never stops. Antarctica melts down in tears. Christ gapes his wounds. God holds his breath. Caesar’s legions, ghosts, ten million, rise, with bleeding Amazons for eyes. I wrote that when I was sixteen and a sap, when I found out that Juliet and Don Quixote fell dead on the same day, and I cried all night. You’re the only one ever heard those silly lines. Well, that’s how it was when Arbuthnot died. I was sixteen again and couldn’t stop crying or writing junk. There went the moon, the planets, Sancho Panza, Rosinante and Ophelia. Half the women at his funeral were old mistresses. A between-the-sheets fan club, plus nieces, girl cousins, and crazy aunts. When we opened our eyes that day it was the second Johnstown flood. Jesus, I do run on. I hear they still got Arbuthnot’s chair in his old office? Anyone sat in it since with a big enough butt and a brain to fit?”

I thought of Manny Leiber’s behind. Constance said:

“God knows how the studio survived. Maybe by Ouija board, with advice from the dead. Don’t laugh. That’s Hollywood, reading the Leo-Virgo-Taurus forecasts, not stepping on cracks be-tween takes. The studio? Give me the grand tour. Let grandma smell the four winds in the fifty-five cities, take the temperature of the maniacs in charge, then on to the Brown Derby maitre d’. I slept with him once, ninety years back. Will he remember the old witch of the Venice shore and let us sit at tea with your Beast?”

“And say what?”

A long wave came in, a short wave rustled on the shore.

“I’ll say,” she closed her eyes, “stop scaring my future-writing dinosaur-loving honorary bastard son.”

“Yes,” I said, “please.”

In the beginning was the fog.

Like the Great Wall of China, it moved over the shore and the land and the mountains at 6 A.M.

My morning voices spoke.

I crept around Constance’s parlor, groping to find my glasses somewhere under an elephant herd of pillows, but gave up and staggered about to find a portable typewriter. I sat blindly stabbing out the words to put an end to
Antipas and the Messiah
.

And it was indeed A Miracle of Fish.

And Simon called Peter pulled in to the shore to find the Ghost by the charcoal bed and the baked fish to be given as gifts, with the word as deliverance to a final good, and the disciples there in a gentle mob and the last hour upon them and the Ascension near and the farewells that would linger beyond two thousand years to be remembered on Mars and shipped on to Alpha Centauri.

And when the Words came from my machine I could not see them, and held them close to my blind wet eyes as Constance dolphined out of a wave, another miracle clothed in rare flesh, to read over my shoulder and give a sad-happy cry and shake me like a pup, glad of my triumph.

I called Fritz.

“Where the hell are you!” he cried.

“Shut up,” I said, gently.

And I read aloud.

And the fish were laid to bake on the charcoals that blew in the wind as fireflies of spark were borne across the sands and Christ spoke and the disciples listened and as dawn rose Christ’s footprints, like the bright sparks, were blown away off the sands and he was departed and the disciples walked to all points away and
their
paths were lifted by the winds and
their
footprints were no more and a New Day truly began as the film ended.

Far off, Fritz was very still.

At last he whispered, “You… son… of… a… bitch.”

And then: “When do you bring that
in
?”

“In three hours.”

“Get here in
two
,” cried Fritz, “and I will kiss your four cheeks. I go now to un-man Manny and out-Herod Herod!”

I hung up and the phone rang.

It was Crumley.

“Is your Balzac still
Honoré
?” he said. “Or are you the great Hemingway fish dead by the pierside, bones picked meatless?”

“Crum,” I sighed.

“I made more calls. But what if we get all the data you’re looking for, find Clarence, identify the awful-looking guy in the Brown Derby, how do we let your goony-bird friend Roy, who seems to be running around the studio in hand-me-down togas, how do we let him know and yank him the hell out? Do I use a giant butterfly net?”

“Crum,” I said.

“Okay, okay. There’s good news and there’s bad. I got to thinking about that portfolio you told me your old pal Clarence dropped outside the Brown Derby. I called the Derby, said I had lost a portfolio. Of course, Mr. Sopwith, the lady said, it’s here!”

Sopwith! So that was Clarence’s name.

“I was afraid, I said, I hadn’t put my address in the portfolio.”

“It’s here, said the lady, 1788 Beachwood? Yeah, I said. I’ll be right over to get it.”

“Crumley! You’re a genius!”

“Not quite. I’m talking from the Brown Derby phone booth
now
.”

“And?” I felt my heart jump.

“The portfolio’s gone. Someone else got the same bright idea. Someone else got here ahead of me. The lady gave a description. It wasn’t Clarence, the way you said. When the lady asked for identification, the guy just walked out with the portfolio. The lady was upset, but no big deal.”

“Ohmigod,” I said. “That means
they
know Clarence’s address.”

“You want me to go and tell him all this?”

“No, no. He’d have a heart attack. He’s scared of me, but I’ll go. Warn him to hide. Christ, anything could happen. 1788 Beachwood?”

“You got it.”

“Crum, you’re the cat’s pajamas.”

“Always was,” he said, “always was. Strange to report the folks down at the Venice station expect me back to work an hour ago. The coroner phoned to say a customer won’t keep. While I’m working, you help. Who else in the studio might know what we need to know? I mean, someone you might trust? Someone who’s lived the studios’ history?”

“Botwin,” I said instantly, and blinked, amazed at my response.

Maggie and her miniature whirring camera, trapping the world day after day, year after year, as it reeled by.

“Botwin?” said Crumley. “Go ask. Meanwhile, Buster—?”

“Yeah?”

“Guard your ass.”

“It’s guarded.”

I hung up and said, “Rattigan?”

“I’ve started the car,” she said. “It’s waiting at the curb.”

We rioted toward the studio late in the afternoon. With three bottles of champagne stashed in her roadster, Constance swore happily at every intersection, leaning over the steering wheel like those dogs that love the wind.

“Gangway!” she cried.

We roared down the middle of Larchmont Boulevard, straddling the dividing line.

“What,” I yelled, “are you doing?!”

“Once there were trolley tracks on each side of the street. Down the middle was a long line of power poles. Harold Lloyd drove in and out, cat-cradling the poles, like
this
!”

Constance swerved the car left.

“And
this
! and
this
!”

We swerved around half a dozen ghosts of long-gone poles, as if pursued by a phantom trolley car.

“Rattigan,” I said.

She saw my solemn face.

“Beachwood Avenue?” she said.

It was four in the afternoon. The last mail of the day was heading north on the avenue. I nodded to Constance. She parked just ahead of the mailman, who trudged along in the still warm sun. He greeted me like a fellow Iowa tourist, plenty cheerful considering the junk mail he unloaded at every door.

All I wanted was to check Clarence’s name and address before I knocked at his door. But the postman couldn’t stop babbling. He told how Clarence walked and ran, what he looked like around the mouth: quivering. Nervous ears that itched up and down on his skull. Eyes mostly white.

The mailman punched my elbow with the mail, laughing. “A Christmas fruitcake, ten years stale! Comes to his bungalow door in a big wrap-around camel’s-hair coat like Adolphe Menjou wore in 1927, when we boys ran up the aisles to pee, away from the ‘mush’ scenes.
Sure
. Old Clarence. I said ‘Boo!’ once and he slammed the door. I bet he showers in that coat, afraid to see himself naked. Scaredy Clarence? Don’t knock too loud—”

But I was gone. I turned in quickly at the Villa Vista Courts and walked up to number 1788.

I did not knock on the door. I scratched with my fingernail on the small glass panes. There were nine of them. I did not try them all. The shade was pulled down behind so I couldn’t see in. When there was no answer I tapped my forefinger, a bit louder.

I imagined I heard Clarence’s rabbit heart pounding inside, behind the glass.

“Clarence!” I called. And waited. “I know you’re in there!”

Again, I thought I heard his pulse racing.

“Call me, dammit!” I cried, at last, “before it’s too late! You know who this is. The studio, dammit! Clarence, if
I
can find you,
they
can, too!”

They? Who did I mean by “they”?

I pounded the door with both fists. One of the glass panes cracked.

“Clarence! Your portfolio! It was at the Brown Derby!”

That did it. I stopped pounding for I heard a sound that might have been a bleat or a muffled cry. The lock rattled. Another lock rattled after that, and a third.

At last the door cracked open, held by an inside brass chain.

Clarence’s haunted face looked down a long tunnel of years at me, close by but so far away I almost thought his voice echoed. “Where?” he pleaded. “
Where
?”

“The Brown Derby,” I said, ashamed. “And someone stole it.”

“Stole?” Tears burst from his eyes. “My portfolio!? Oh God,” he mourned. “You’ve done this to me.”

“No, no, listen—”

“If they try to break in, I’ll kill myself. They can’t have them!”

And he glanced tearfully over his shoulder at all the files I could see crowded beyond, and the bookcases, and the walls full of signed portraits.

My Beasts, Roy had said at his own funeral, my lovelies, my dears.

My beauties, Clarence was saying, my soul, my life!

“I don’t want to die,” mourned Clarence, and shut the door.

“Clarence!” I tried a last time. “Who’s
they
? If I knew, I might save you! Clarence!”

A shade banged up across the court.

A door half opened in another bungalow.

All I could say then, exhausted, was, in a half whisper: “Goodbye…”

I went back to the roadster. Constance was sitting there looking at the Hollywood Hills, trying to enjoy the weather.

“What was
that
all about?” she said.

“One nut, Clarence. Another one, Roy.” I slumped into the seat beside her. “Okay, take me to the nut factory.”

Constance gunned us to the studio gate.

“God,” gasped Constance, staring up, “I hate hospitals.”

“Hospitals?!”

“Those rooms are full of undiagnosed cases. A thousand babies have been conceived, or born, in that joint. It’s a snug home where the bloodless get transfusions of greed. That coat of arms above the gate? A lion rampant with a broken back. Next: a blind goat with no balls. Then: Solomon chopping a live baby in half. Welcome to Green Glades mortuary!”