Umney's Last Case (8 page)

through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of

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loss . . .'' He looked directly at me and

said, ``Does any of this make any sense to you?''

`Ìt makes sense,'' I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.

``There were lots of pills left in the house,'' he said. ``Linda and I were like the

Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde--we

really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very

close to taking a couple of double

handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn't in terms of suicide, but in

terms of wanting to catch up to

Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.''

I nodded. It was what I'd thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we'd said

toodle-oo to each other in

Blondie's, I'd found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the

center of her forehead. Except it had been

Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of

flexible bullet to the brain.

Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired-looking man in the hobo's

pants, was responsible for

everything. The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting

saner all the time.

I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw

somehow did not surprise me

in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars,

buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in

their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could

not be bothered with animating

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much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his

own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky

to still be breathing myself.

``So what happened?'' I asked. ``How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do

you mind?''

``No, I don't mind. I can't give you a very good answer, though, because I don't

exactly know. All I know for sure is

that every time I thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought specifically

was, `Clyde Umney would never do

this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call it the coward's way out.' ''

I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible

ailment in the face--Vernon's

cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son--I might make an

exception, but take the pipe just

because you were depressed? That was for pansies.

``Then I thought, `But that's Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a

figment of your imagination.' That

idea wouldn't live, though. It's the dumbbells of the world--politicians and lawyers,

for the most part--who sneer at

imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or

feel it or fuck it. They think that way

because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I

knew better. Hell, I ought to--my

imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or

so.

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`Àt the same time, I knew I couldn't go on living in what I used to think of as `the

real world,' by which I suppose we

all mean `the only world.' That's when I started to realize there was only one place

left where I could go and feel

welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here--Los

Angeles, in 1930-something. And

the person was you.''

I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn't

turn around.

Partly because I was afraid to.

And partly because I no longer knew if I could.

_______________________________________________________________________

VI. Umney's Last Case.

On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look

at the woman on the corner, who

was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a

momentary length of beautiful

leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy

was holding out his battered old

baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating

six feet above the street like a ghost

called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from

Peoria Smith's overturned table.

Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold,

the recently deceased Cuban

bandleader below it.

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Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off.

`Àt first I thought that meant I'd be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward,

thinking I was you, but that was all

right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you

see? And then, gradually, I began

to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way

I could actually . . . well . . . slip all

the way in. And do you know what the key was?''

``Yes,'' I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget

revolved, and suddenly the

newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two

later an old DeSoto rolled

jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the

baseball glove, and both he and

the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled

halfway to the gutter, then froze solid

again.

``You do?'' He sounded surprised.

``Yeah. Peoria was the key.''

``That's right.'' He laughed, then cleared his throat--nervous sounds, both of them.

`Ì keep forgetting that you're me.''

It was a luxury I didn't have.

`Ì was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter

One six different ways to Sunday

before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.''

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That made me swing around in a hurry. ``The hell you say!''

`Ì didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all

along. I don't want to convene the lit

class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade--writing stories in the

first person is a funny, tricky

business. It's as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a

series of letters or dispatches from

some far-off battle zone. It's very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this

case I did. It was as if your little part

of Sunset Boulevard were the Garden of Eden--''

`Ì never heard it called that before,'' I remarked.

``--and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria

Smith.''

Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken,

although the sky was cloudless. The

Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment

there was just a hole where it

had been, and then a new building filled it--a restaurant called Petit Déjeuner with a

window full of ferns. I glanced up

the street and saw that other changes were going on--new buildings were replacing old

ones with silent, spooky speed.

They meant I was running out of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew something

else, as well--there was probably

not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. When God walks into your office and

tells you He's decided he likes

your life better than His own, what the hell are your options?

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`Ì junked all the various drafts of the novel I'd started two months after my wife's

death,'' Landry said. `Ìt was

easy--poor crippled things that they were. And then I started a new one. I called it .

. . can you guess, Clyde?''

``Sure,'' I said, and swung around. It took all my strength, but what I suppose this

geek would call my ``motivation''

was good. Sunset Strip isn't exactly the Champs Elysees or Hyde Park, but it's my

world. I didn't want to watch him

tear it apart and rebuild it the way he wanted it. `Ì suppose you called it Umney's

Last Case.''

He looked faintly surprised. ``You suppose right.''

I waved my hand. It was an effort, but I managed. `Ì didn't win the Shamus of the

Year Award in 1934 and '35 for

nothing, you know.''

He smiled at that. ``Yes. I always did like that line.''

Suddenly I hated him--hated him like poison. If I could have summoned the strength to

lunge across the desk and choke

the life out of him, I would have done it. He saw it, too. The smile faded.

``Forget it, Clyde--you wouldn't have a chance.''

``Why don't you get out of here?'' I grated at him. ``Just get out and let a working

stiff alone?''

``Because I can't. I couldn't even if I wanted to . . . and I don't.'' He looked at me

with an odd mixture of anger and

pleading. ``Try to look at it from my point of view, Clyde--''

``Do I have any choice? Have I ever?''

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He ignored that. ``Here's a world where I'll never get any older, a year where all the

clocks are stopped at just about

eighteen months before World War II, where the newspapers always cost three cents,

where I can eat all the eggs and

red meat I want and never have to worry about my cholesterol level.''

`Ì don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.''

He leaned forward earnestly. ``No, you don't! And that's exactly the point, Clyde!

This is a world where I can really do

the job I dreamed about doing when I was a little boy--I can be a private eye. I can

go racketing around in a fast car at

two in the morning, shoot it out with hoodlums--knowing they may die but I won't--and

wake up eight hours later

next to a beautiful chanteuse with the birds twittering in the trees and the sun

shining in my bedroom window. That

clear, beautiful California sun.''

``My bedroom window faces west,'' I said.

``Not anymore,'' he replied calmly, and I felt my hands curl into strengthless fists

on the arms of my chair. ``Do you see

how wonderful it is? How perfect? In this world, people don't go half-mad with itching

caused by a stupid, undignified

disease called shingles. In this world, people don't go gray, let alone bald.''

He looked at me levelly, and in his gaze I saw no hope for me. No hope at all.

`Ìn this world, beloved sons never die of AIDS and beloved wives never take overdoses

of sleeping pills. Besides, you

were always the outsider here, not me, no matter how it might have felt to you. This

is my world, born in my

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imagination and maintained by my effort and ambition. I loaned it to you for awhile,

that's all . . . and now I'm taking

it back.''

``Finish telling me how you got in, will you do that much? I really want to hear.''

`Ìt was easy. I tore it apart, starting with the Demmicks, who were never much more

than a lousy imitation of Nick and

Nora Charles, and rebuilt it in my own image. I took away all the beloved supporting

characters, and now I'm removing

all the old landmarks. I'm pulling the rug out from under you a strand at a time, in

other words, and I'm not proud of it,

but I am proud of the sustained effort of will it's taken to pull it off.''

`What's happened to you back in your own world?'' I was still keeping him talking, but

now it was nothing but habit,

like an old milk-horse finding his way back to the barn on a snowy morning.

He shrugged. ``Dead, maybe. Or maybe I really have left a physical self--a husk-sitting catatonic in some mental

institution. I don't think either of those things is really the case, though--all of

this feels too real. No, I think I made it

all the way, Clyde. I think that back home they're looking for a missing writer . . .

with no idea that he's disappeared

into the storage banks of his own word-processor. And the truth is I really don't

care.''

`Ànd me? What happens to me?''

``Clyde,'' he said, `Ì don't care about that, either.''

He bent over his gadget again.

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``Don't!'' I said sharply.

He looked up.

`Ì . . .'' I heard the quiver in my voice, tried to control it, and found I couldn't.

``Mister, I'm afraid. Please leave me

alone. I know it's not really my world out there anymore--hell, in here, either--but