"Wading three feet deep. I wonder how it felt, that last second when old Rattigan drowned in this flood. Franco's Falangists, Hitler's youth, Stalin's Reds, Detroit's riots, Mayor La Guardia reading the Sunday funnies, what a death!"
"To hell with it. Look."
The remnant of Clarence Rattigan's burial cot was sticking up out of a cat litter of STOCK MARKET CRASHES and BANKS CLOSE. I picked up a final discard. Nijinsky danced on the theater page.
"A couple of nuts," said Crumley. "Nijinsky, and old Rattigan, who saved this review!"
"Touch your eyelids."
Crumley did so. His fingers came away wet.
"Damn," he said. "This is a graveyard. Move!"
I grabbed TOKYO SUES FOR PEACE…
And then headed for the sea.
Crumley drove me to my old beach apartment, but it was raining again, and I looked at the ocean threatening to drown us all with a storm that could knock at midnight and bring Constance, dead, and the other Rattigan, also dead, and crush my bed with rain and seaweed. Hell! I yanked Clarence Rattigan's newspapers off the wall.
Crumley drove me back to my small empty tract house, with no storm on the shore, and stashed vodka by my bed, Crumley's Elixir, and left the lights on and said he would call later that night to see if my soul was decent, and drove away.
I heard hail on the roof. Someone thumping a coffin lid. I called Maggie across a continent of rain. "Do I hear someone crying?" she said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
the sun was long gone when my phone rang.
"You know what time it is?" said Crumley.
"Ohmigod, it's night!"
"People dying takes a lot out of you. You done blubbering? I can't stand hysterical sob sisters, or bastard sons who carry Kleenex."
"Am I your bastard son?"
"Hit the shower, brush your teeth, and get the Daily News off your porch. I rang your bell, but you were lost. Did Queen Califia tell your fortune? She should have told her own."
"Is she— ?"
"I'm heading back to Bunker Hill at seven-thirty. Be out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella!"
I was out front with a clean shirt and an umbrella at seven twenty-nine. When I got in, Crumley grabbed my chin and scanned my face.
"Hey, no stormy weather!"
And we roared to Bunker Hill.
Passing Callahan and Ortega seemed different suddenly.
There were no police cars or morgue wagons.
"You know a scotch ale called Old Peculiar?" said Crumley as we pulled up to the curb. "Look at the nonevent outside Queen Califia's."
I also looked at the newspaper in my lap. Califia wasn't a headliner. She was buried near the obits.
" 'Renowned psychic, famed in silent films, dies in fall. Alma Crown, a.k.a. Queen Califia, was found on the steps of her Bunker Hill residence. Neighbors reported hearing her peacock cry. Searching, Califia fell. Her book The Chemistry of Palmistry was a 1939 bestseller. Her ashes are to be strewn in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, where, some said, she was born.' "
"Garbage," said Crumley.
We saw someone on the front porch of the Queen's house and walked up. It was a young woman in her twenties, with long dark hair and Gypsy coloring, wringing her hands, moaning, and letting tears fall, pointing her face toward the front door.
"Awful," she mourned. "Oh, awful, awful."
I opened the front door and stared in.
"No, my God, no."
Crumley came to look in at the desolation.
For the house was completely empty. All the pictures, crystal balls, tarot cards, lamps, books, records, furniture had vanished. Some mysterious van and transfer company had lugged it all away.
I walked into the small kitchen, pulled open drawers. Empty, vacuumed clean. Pantry: no spices, canned fruit. The cupboard was bare, so her poor dog had none.
In her bedroom the closet was crammed with hangers but no tent-size dressing gowns, stockings, shoes.
Crumley and I went out to stare at the young Gypsy woman's face. "I saw it all!" she cried, pointing in all directions. "They stole everything! They're all poor. Excuses! Poor! Across the street, when the police left, they knocked me down, old women, men, kids, yelling, laughing, ran in and out, carrying chairs, drapes, pictures, books. Grab this, grab that! A fiesta! One hour and it was empty. They went to that house over there! My God, the laughs. Look, my hands, the blood! You want Califia's junk? Go knock on doors! You gonna go?"
Crumley and I sat down on either side of her. Crumley took her left hand. I took her right.
"Sonsabitches," she gasped. "Sonsabitches."
"That's about it," said Crumley. "You can go home. There's nothing to guard. Nothing inside."
"She is inside. They took her body, but she's still there. I'll wait until she says go."
We both looked over her shoulder at the screen door and some unseen massive ghost.
"How will you know when she says go?"
The Gypsy wiped her eyes. "I'll know."
"Where are you going?" said Crumley.
Because I was on the walk heading across the street. At the opposite house I knocked.
Silence. I knocked again.
I peered through a side window. I could see shapes of furniture in midfloor, where there should be no furniture, and too many lamps, and rolled carpets.
I kicked the door and cursed and went to the middle of the street and was about to yell at every door when the Gypsy girl came quietly to touch my arm.
"I can go now," she said.
"Califia?"
"Said okay."
"Where to?" Crumley nodded at his car.
She could not stop staring at Califia's home, the center of all California.
"I have friends near the Red Rooster Plaza. Could you-"
"I could," said Crumley.
The Gypsy looked back at the vanishing palace of a queen.
"I will be back tomorrow," she called.
"She knows you will," I said.
We passed Callahan and Ortega, but this time Crumley ignored it.
We were quiet on the way to the plaza named for a rooster of a certain color.
We dropped the Gypsy.
"My God," I said on the way back, "it's like a friend, years ago, died, and the immigrants from Cuernavaca poured in, grabbed his collection of old 1900 phonographs, Caruso records, Mexican masks. Left his place like the Egyptian tombs, empty."
"That's what it's like to be poor," said Crumley.
"I grew up poor. I never stole."
"Maybe you never had a real chance."
We passed Queen Califia's place a final time.
"She's in there, all right. The Gypsy was right."
"She was right. But you're nuts."
"All this," I said. "It's too much. Too much. Constance hands me two wrong-number phone books and flees. We almost drown in twenty thousand leagues of old newspapers. Now, a dead queen. Makes me wonder, is Father Rattigan okay?"
Crumley swerved the car to the curb near a phone booth.
"Here's a dime!"
In the phone booth I dialed the cathedral.
"Is Mister…" I blushed. "Father Rattigan… is he all right?"
"All right? He's at confession!"
"Good," I said foolishly, "as long as the one he's confessing is okay."
"Nobody," said the voice, "is ever okay!"
I heard a click. I dragged myself back to the car. Crumley eyed me like a dog's dinner. "Well?"
"He's alive. Where are we going?"
"Who knows. From here on, this trip is a retreat. You know Catholic retreats? Long silent weekends. Shut la trap. Okay?"
We drove to Venice City Hall. Crumley got out and slammed his door.
He was gone half an hour. When he returned he stuck his head in the driver's-side window and said, "Now hear this, I just took a week's sick leave. And, Jesus, this is sick. We got one week to find Constance, shield St. Vibiana's priest, raise the Lazarus dead, and warn yo
ur wife to stop me from strangling you. Nod your head yes."
I nodded.
"Next twenty-four hours you don't speak without permission! Now where are those goddamn phone books?"
I handed him the Books of the Dead.
Crumley, behind the wheel, scowled at them.
"Say one last thing and shut up!"
"You're still my pal!" I blurted.
"Pity," he said, and banged the gas.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
we went back to Rattigan's and stood down on the shoreline. It was early evening and her lights were still full on; the place was like a full moon and a rising sun of architecture. Gershwin was still manhandling Manhattan one moment, Paris the next.
"I bet they buried him in his piano," said Crumley.
We got out the one Book of the Dead, Rattigan's personal phone pals, mostly cold and buried, and repeated what we had done before. Went through it page by page, with a growing sense of mortality.
On page 30 we came to the Rs.
There it was: Clarence Rattigan's dead phone and a red Christian cross over his name.
"Damn. Now let's check Califia again."
We riffled back and there it was, with big red lines under her name and a crucifix.
"That means-?"
"Whoever planted this book with Constance marked all the names with red ink and a cross, handed it over, and then killed the first two victims. Maybe. I'm running half-empty."
"Or, hoping Constance would see the red ink crucifixes, before they were killed, panic on that night she came running, and destroy them inadvertently with her shouts. Christ! Let's check the other red lines and crosses. Check St. Vibiana's."
Crumley turned the pages and exhaled. "Red crucifix."
"But Father Rattigan's still alive!" I said. "Hell!"
I trudged up the sand to Rattigan's poolside phone. I dialed St. Vibiana's.
"Who's this?" a sharp voice answered.
"Father Rattigan! Thank God!"
"For what?"
"This is Constance's friend. The idiot."
"Dammit!" the priest cried.
"Don't take any more confessions tonight!"
"You giving orders?"
"Father, you're alive! I mean, well, is there anything we can do to protect you, or-"
"No, no!" the voice cried. "Go to that other heathen church! That Jack and the Beanstalk place!"
The telephone slammed.
I looked at Crumley, he looked at me.
"Look under Grauman's," I said.
Crumley looked. "Chinese, yeah. And Grauman's name. And a red circle and a crucifix. But he died years ago!"
"Yeah, but part of Constance is buried there, or written there in cement. I'll show you. Last chance to see Jack and the Beanstalk*."
"If we time it," said Crumley, "the film will be over."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
we didn't have to time it right.
When Crumley dropped me in front of the Other Church, the great loud boisterous romantic tearstained celluloid cathedral… There was a sign on the red Chinese front door, CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS, and some workmen moving in and out. A few people were in the forecourt, fitting their shoes in the footprints.
Crumley dropped me and vamoosed.
I turned to look at the great pagoda facade. Ten percent Chinese, ninety percent Grauman's. Little Sid's.
He was, some said, knee-high to a midget, the eighth Dwarf Cinema Munchkin, all four feet bursting with film clips, sound tracks, Kong shrieking on the Empire State, Colman in Shangri-la, friend to Garbo, Dietrich, and Hepburn, haberdasher to Chaplin, golf buddy to Laurel and Hardy, keeper of the flame, recollector of ten thousand Pasts… Sid, pourer of cement, imprinter of fair and flat feet, begging and getting pavement autographs.
And there I stood on a lava flow of signatures of ghosts who had abandoned their shoe sizes.
I watched the tourists quietly testing their feet in the vast spread of cement prints, laughing softly.
What a church, I thought. More worshipers here than at St. Vibiana's.
"Rattigan," I whispered. "Are you here?"
CHAPTER TWENTY
IT was said that Constance Rattigan had the smallest tootsies in all Hollywood, perhaps in the whole world. She had her shoes cobbled in Rome, and airmailed to her twice a year because her old ones were melted from champagne poured by crazed suitors. Small feet, dainty toes, tiny shoes.
Her imprints left in Grauman's cement the night of August 22, 1929, proved this. Girls testing their size found their feet to be titanic and pitiful and abandoned her prints in despair.
So here I was alone on a strange night in Grauman's forecourt, the only place in dead, unburied Hollywood where shoppers brought dreams for refunds.
The crowd cleared. I saw her footprints some twenty feet away. I froze.
Because a small man in a black trench coat, a snap-brim hat yanked over his brow, had just tucked his shoes in Rat-tigan's footprints.
"Jesus God," I gasped. "They fit!"
The small man gazed at his tiny shoes. For the first time in forty years, Rattigan's tracks were occupied.
"Constance," I whispered.
The small man's shoulders shrank.
"Right behind you," I whispered.
"Are you one of them?" I heard a voice say from under the large dark hat.
"One of what?" I said.
"Are you Death chasing me?"
"Just a friend trying to keep up."
"I've been waiting for you," the voice said, not moving, the feet planted firmly in the footprints of Constance Rattigan.
"What's it mean?" I said. "Why this wild goose chase? Are you scared or playing tricks?"
"Why would you say that?" the voice said, hidden.
"Good grief," I said. "Is this all some cheap dodge? Someone said you might want to write your life and needed someone to help. If you expect that to be me, no thanks. I've got better things to do."
"What's better than me?" said the voice, growing smaller.
"No one, but is Death really after you or are you looking for a new life, God knows what kind?"
"What better than Uncle Sid's concrete mortuary? All the names with nothing beneath. Ask away."
"Are you going to turn and face me?"
"I couldn't talk then."
"Is this some way of getting me to help you uncover your past? Is the casket half-full or half-empty? Did someone else make those red marks in your Book of the Dead, or did you make them?"
"It had to be someone else. Or else why would I be so frightened? Those red ink marks? I've got to look them up, find which ones are dead already, and which are just about to die but still alive. Do you ever have the feeling everything's falling apart?"
"Not you, Constance."
"Christ, yes! Some nights I sleep Clara Bow, wake up Noah, wet with vodka. Is my face ruined?"
"A lovely ruin."
"But still-"
Rattigan stared out at Hollywood Boulevard. "Once there were real tourists. Now it's torn shirts. Everything's lost, junior. Venice pier drowned, trolley tracks sunk. Hollywood and Vine, was it ever there?"
"Once. When the Brown Derby hung their walls with cartoons of Gable and Dietrich, and the headwaiters were Russian princes. Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck drove by in their roadster. Hollywood and Vine? You planted your feet there and knew pure joy."
"You talk nice. Want to know where Mama's been?"
She moved her arm. She took some newspaper clippings from beneath her coat. I saw the names Califia and Mount Lowe.
"I was there, Constance," I said. "The old man was crushed by a collapsed haystack of news. God, it looked like he died on the San Andreas fault. Someone pushed the stacks, I think. An indecent burial. And Queen Califia? A fall downstairs. And your brother, the priest. Did you visit all three, Constance?"
"I don't have to answer."
"Let me try a different question. Do you like yourself?"
"What!?"
"Look. I like myself. I'm not perfect, hell no, but I never bedded anyone if I felt they were breakable. Lots of men say hit the hay, live! Not me. Even when it's offered on a plate. So with no sins, I don't often have bad dreams. Oh, sure, there was the time I ran away from my grandma when I was a kid, ran away and left her blocks behind, so she came home weeping. I still can't forgive myself. Or hitting my dog, just once, I hit him. And that still hurts, thirty years later. Not much of a list, right, to make bad dreams?"
Constance stood very still.
"God, God," she said, "how I wish I had your dreams."
"Ask and I'll give you the loan."
"You poor dumb innocent stupid kid. That's why I love you. Somewhere, at heaven's gate, can I trade in my old chimney soot nightmares for fresh clean angel wings?"
"Ask your brother."
"He threw me downstairs to hell long ago."
"You haven't answered my question. Do you like yourself?"
"What I see in the mirror, sure. It's what's inside the glass, deep under, scares me. I wake late nights with all that stuff swimming behind my face. Christ, that's sad. Can you help me?"
"How? I don't know which is which, you or your mirror. What's up front, what's beneath."
Constance shifted her feet.
"Can't you stand still?" I said. "If I say 'red light,' stop. Your feet are stuck in that cement. What then?"
I saw her shoes ache to pull free.
"People are staring at us!"
"The theater's closed. Most of the lights are out. The forecourt is empty."
"You don't understand. I've got to go. Straight on."
I looked up at the front doors of Grauman's, still open, with some workmen carrying equipment inside.
"It's the next step, but God, how do I get there?"
"Just walk."
"You don't understand. It's hopscotch. There must be other footprint paths to the door, if I can find them. Which way do I jump?"
Her head moved. The dark hat fell to the pavement. Constance's close-cropped bronze hair came into view. She still stared ahead, as if afraid to show me her face.
Let's All Kill Constance Page 5