Let's All Kill Constance Read online

  Sally, Dolly, Molly, Holly, Gaily, Nellie, Roby, Sally, Dolly, Molly—around about, on and on.

  I studied old man Rattigan, frozen in place, and whether his grimace showed triumph or need, I could not say.

  I glanced beyond to those walls now empty of Sally, Dolly, Molly, but whoever had seized them hadn’t figured that the old man, seeing his “family” snatched, had switched on this loop to save the past. Or—

  My mind sank.

  I heard Betty Kelly’s voice shrieking what Constance had shrieked, Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. And Quickly recalling, How do I get it back, back, back? Get what back? Her other self?

  Did someone do this to you? I thought, standing over the old dead man. Or did you do it to yourself?

  The dead man’s white marble eyes were still.

  I cut the projector.

  All the faces still flowed on my retina, the dancing daughter, the butterfly, the Chinese vamp, the tomboy clown.

  “Poor lost soul,” I whispered.

  “You know him?” said Fritz.

  “No.”

  “Then he’s no poor lost soul.”

  “Fritz! Did you ever have a heart?”

  “Simple bypass. I had it removed.”

  “How do you live without it?”

  “Because …” Fritz handed me his monocle. I fit the cold glass to my eye and stared.

  “Because,” he said, “I’m a—”

  “Stupid goddamn son of a bitch?”

  “Bull’s-eye!” Fritz said.

  “Let’s go,” he added. “This place is a morgue.”

  “Always was,” I said.

  I called Henry, and told him to take a taxi to Grauman’s. Pronto.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Blind Henry was waiting for us in an aisle leading down to the orchestra pit and from there to the hidden basement dressing rooms.

  “Don’t tell,” Henry said.

  “About what, Henry?”

  “The pictures up in that projection booth. Kaput? That’s Fritz Wong’s lingo.”

  “The same to you,” said Fritz.

  “Henry, how’d you guess?”

  “I knew.” Henry fixed his sightless eyes down at the pit. “I just visited the mirrors. I don’t need a cane, and sure as heck no flashlight. Just reached when I was there and touched the glass. That’s how I knew the pictures upstairs had to be gone. Felt all along forty feet of glass. Clean. All scraped away. So …” He stared again at the sightless uphill seats. “Upstairs. All gone. Right?”

  “Right.” I exhaled, somewhat stunned.

  “Let me show you.” Henry turned to the pit.

  “Wait, I’ve got my flash.”

  “When you going to learn?” Henry mocked, and stepped down into the pit in one silent motion.

  I followed. Fritz glared at our parade.

  “Well,” I said, “what are you waiting for?”

  Fritz moved.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “There.” Henry pointed his nose at the long line of mirrors. “What did I say?”

  I moved along the aisle of glass, touching with my flash and then my fingers.

  “So?” Fritz growled.

  “There were names and now no names, just like there were pictures and now no pictures.”

  “Told you,” said Henry.

  “How come the sightless are never the wordless?” said Fritz.

  “Got to do something to fill the time. Shall I recite the names?”

  I said the names from memory.

  “You left out Carmen Carlotta,” said Henry.

  “Oh, yeah. Carlotta.”

  Fritz glanced up.

  “And whoever swiped the pictures upstairs?”

  “Cleaned and scraped the mirrors.”

  “So all those ladies are like they never was,” said Henry.

  He leaned in along the line of mirrors and gave a last brush with his blind fingertips to the glass here, there, and farther on down. “Yeah. Empty. Damn. Those names were caked on. Took lots to scrub it off. Who?”

  “Henrietta, Mabel, Gloria, Lydia, Alice …”

  “They all came down to clean up?”

  “They did and they didn’t. We’ve already said it, Henry, that all of those women came and went, were born and died, and wrote their names, like grave markers.”

  “So?”

  “And those names were not written all at once. So starting back in the twenties, those women, ladies, whatever, came down here for their obsequies, a funeral of one. When they looked in their first mirror, they saw one face, and when they moved to the next, the face was changed.”

  “Now you’re cooking.”

  “So, Henry, what’s here is a grand parade of funerals, births, and burials, all done with the same two hands and one spade.”

  “But the scribbles”—Henry reached out to emptiness—“were different.”

  “People change. She couldn’t make up her mind to one life or how to live it. So she stood in front of the mirror and wiped off her lipstick and painted another mouth, and washed off her eyebrows and painted better ones, or widened her eyes and raised her hairline and tilted her hat like a lampshade or took it off and threw it, or took off her dress and stood here starkers.”

  “Starkers.” Henry smiled. “Now you got it.”

  “Hush,” I said.

  “That’s work,” Henry continued. “Scribbling those mirrors, looking to see how she changed.”

  “Didn’t happen overnight. Once a year, maybe two years, and she’d show up with a smaller mouth or a thinner shape and liked what she saw and went away to become that person for half a year or just one summer. How’s that, Henry?”

  Henry moved his lips, whispering, “Constance.

  “Sure,” he murmured, “she never smelled the same way twice.” Henry shuffled, touching the mirrors until he reached the open manhole. “I’m near, right?”

  “One more step would do it, Henry.”

  We looked down at the round hole in the cement. From below came sounds of winds blowing in from San Fernando, Glendale, and who knows where else—Far Rockaway? The light rain runoff was sliding below, a mere trickle, hardly enough to cool your ankles.

  “Dead end,” said Henry. “Nothing upstairs, nothing down. Clues to somebody gone. But where?”

  As if in answer, a most ungodly cry came from the dark hole in the cold floor. We all jumped.

  “Jesus!” Fritz cried.

  “Christ!” I yelled.

  “Lord!” said Henry. “That can’t be Molly, Dolly, Holly, can it?”

  I repeated that rosary in silence.

  Fritz read my lips and cursed.

  The cry came again, farther away, being carried downstream. Tears exploded from my eyes. I jumped forward to sway over the manhole. Fritz grabbed my elbow.

  “Did you hear?” I cried.

  “Nothing!” said Fritz.

  “That scream!”

  “That’s just the water,” Fritz said.

  “Fritz!”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “Fritz!”

  “The way you say Fritz, I lie. No lie. You don’t really want to, hell, go down there! Godammit!”

  “Let me go!”

  “If your wife was here, she’d push you in, dummkopf!”

  I stared at the open manhole. Far away there was another cry. Fritz cursed.

  “You come with me,” I said.

  “No, no.”

  “You afraid?”

  “Afraid?” Fritz plucked the monocle from his eye. It was like pulling the spigot on his blood. His suntan paled. His eye watered. “Afraid? Of a damn dark stupid underground cave, Fritz Wong?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry for the greatest UFA director in cinema history.” He planted his fiery monocle back in its groove.

  “Well, what now?” he demanded. “I find a phone and call Crumley to drag you out of this black hole? You goddamn teenage death-wisher!”
/>
  “I’m no teenager.”

  “No? Then why do I see crouched by that damn hole an Olympic chump high-diving into a tide half an inch deep? Go on, break your neck, drown in garbage!”

  “Tell Crumley to drive into the storm drain and meet me halfway from the sea. If he sees Constance, grab her. If he finds me, grab even quicker.”

  Fritz shut one eye to target me with fire from the other, contempt under glass.

  “You will take direction from an Academy Award–winning director?”

  “What?”

  “Drop quick. When you hit, don’t stop. Whatever’s down there can’t grab you if you run! If you see her, tell her to try to catch up. ’Stood?”

  “ ’Stood!”

  “Now die like a dog. Or …” he added, scowling, “live like a stoop who got the hell through.”

  “Meet you at the ocean?”

  “I won’t be there!”

  “Oh yes you will!”

  He lurched toward the basement door, and Henry.

  “You want to follow that idiot?” he roared.

  “No.”

  “You afraid of the dark?”

  “I am the dark!” said Henry.

  They were gone.

  Cursing Germanic curses, I climbed down into mists, fogs, and rains of night.

  Chapter Forty

  Quite Suddenly I was in Mexico, 1945. Rome, 1950.

  Catacombs.

  The thing about darkness is you can imagine, in one direction, wall-to-wall mummies torn from their graves because they couldn’t pay the funeral rent.

  Or kindling by the thousand-bone-piles, polo heads of skulls to be hammered downfield.

  Darkness.

  And me caught between ways that led to eternal twilights in Mexico, eternity beneath the Vatican.

  Darkness.

  I stared at the ladder leading up to safety—Blind Henry and angry Fritz. But they were long gone toward the light and the crazies out front of Grauman’s.

  I heard the surf pounding like a great heart, ten miles downstream in Venice. There, hell, was safety. But twenty thousand yards of dim concrete floor stood between me and the salty night wind.

  I gasped air because …

  A pale man shambled out of the dark.

  I don’t mean he walked crazy-legs, but there was something about his whole frame, his knees and elbows, the way his head toppled or his hands flopped like shot birds. His stare froze me.

  “I know you,” he cried.

  I dropped the flashlight.

  He grabbed it and exclaimed, “What’re you doing down here?” His voice knocked off the concrete walls. “Didn’t you used to be—?” He said my name. “Sure! Jesus, you hiding? You down here to stay? Welcome, I guess.” His pale shadow arm waved my flashlight. “Some place, eh? Been here horses’ years. Came down to see. Never went back. Lotsa friends. Want to meet ’em?”

  I shook my head.

  He snorted. “Hell! Why would you want to meet these lost underground jerks?”

  “How do you know my name?” I said. “Did we go to school together?”

  “You don’t remember? Hell and damn!”

  “Harold?” I said. “Ross?”

  There was just the drip of a lone faucet somewhere.

  I added more names. Tears leaped to my eyes. Ralph, Sammy, Arnold, school chums. Gary, Philip, off to war, for God’s sake.

  “Who are you? When did I know you?”

  “Nobody ever knows anyone,” he said, backing off.

  “Were you my best pal?”

  “I always knew you’d get on. Always knew I’d get lost,” he said, a mile away.

  “The war.”

  “I died before the war. Died after it. I was never born, so how come?” Fading.

  “Eddie! Ed. Edward. Eduardo, it’s got to be!” My heart beat swiftly, my voice rose.

  “When did you last call? Did you get around to my funeral? Did you even know?”

  “I never knew,” I said, inching closer.

  “Come again. Don’t knock. I’ll always be here. Wait! You searching for someone?” he cried. “What’s she look like? You hear that? What’s she look like? Am I right? Yes, no?”

  “Yes!” I blurted.

  “She went that way.” He waved my flash.

  “When—?”

  “Just now. What’s she doing here in Dante’s Inferno?”

  “What did she look like?” I burst out.

  “Chanel No. 5!”

  “What?”

  “Chanel! That’ll bring the rats running. She’ll be lucky if she makes it to the surf. ‘Stay off Muscle Beach!’ I yelled.”

  “What?”

  “‘Stay!’ I yelled. She’s here somewhere. Chanel No. 5!”

  I seized my flash from his hands, turned it back on his ghost face.

  “Where?”

  “Why?” He laughed wildly.

  “God, I don’t know.”

  “This way, yeah, this way.”

  His laugh caromed in all directions.

  “Hold on! I can’t see!”

  “You don’t have to. Chanel!”

  More laughter.

  I swiveled my flash.

  Now, as he babbled, I heard something like weather, a seasonal change, a distant rainfall. Dry wash, I thought, but not dry, a flash flood, this damned place ankle-deep, knee-deep, then drowned all the way to the sea!

  I whipped my flashlight beam up, around, back. Nothing. The sound grew. More whispers coming, yes, not a change of season, dry weather becoming wet, but whispers of people, not rain on the channel floor but the slap of bare feet on cement, and the shuffled murmur of quiet discovery, arguments, curiosity.

  People, I thought, my God, more shadows like this one, more voices, the whole damn clan, shadows and shadows of shadows, like the silent ghosts on Rattigan’s ceiling, specters that flowed up, around, and vanished like rainfall.

  But what if her film ghosts had blown free of her projector, and the pale screens up above in Grauman’s, and the wind blew and the phantoms caught cobwebs and light and found voices, what if, dear God, what if ?

  Stupid! I cut the light, for the rain-channel-crazed man was still mumbling and yammering close. I felt his hot breath on my cheek and I lurched back, afraid to light his face, afraid to sluice the channel a second time to freeze the floodwater of ghost voices, for they were louder now, closer. The dark flowed, the unseen crowd gathered, as this crazed fool grew taller, nearer, and I felt a plucking at my sleeves to seize, hold, bind, and the rainfall voices far off blew nearer and I knew that I should get, go, run like hell and hope they were all legless wonders!

  “I—” I bleated.

  “What’s wrong?” my friend cried.

  “I—”

  “Why are you afraid? Look. Look! Look there!”

  And I was thrust and bumped through darkness to a greater mass of darkness, which was a cluster of shadows and then flesh. A crowd gathered around a shape that wept and lamented and yearned and it was the sound of a woman drowning in darkness.

  As the woman moaned and cried and wept and grew silent to mourn again, I edged near.

  And then someone thought to hold out a cigarette lighter, clicking it so that the small blue flame extended toward a shawled and unkempt creature, that fretting soul.

  Inspired, another lighter drifted out of the night, hissing, and breathed light to hold steady. And then another and another, small flame after flame, like so many fireflies gathered in a circle until there was illumination circling steadily. And floating within to reveal that misery, that exaltation, that whispering, that sobbing, that voice of sudden pronouncements, were six, twelve, twenty more small blue fires, thrust and held to ignite the voice, to give it a shape, to shine the mystery. The more firefly lights, the higher the voice shrilled, asking for some unseen gift, recognition, asking for attention, demanding to live, asking to solve that form, face, and presence.

  “Only from my voices, I would lose all heart!” she lame
nted.

  What? I thought. What’s that? Familiar! I almost guessed. Almost knew. What?

  “The bells came down from heaven and their echoes linger in the fields. Through the quiet of the countryside, my voices!” she cried.

  What? Almost! Familiar, I thought. Oh God, what?

  Then a thunderous flood of storm wind flashed from the far sea, drenched with salt odor and a smash of thunder.

  “You!” I cried. “You!”

  And all the fires blew out to screams in utter darkness.

  I called her name, but the only answer was a torrent of shouts in an avalanche of feet in full stampede.

  In the roar and rush and ranting, some soft flesh struck my arm, my face, my knee, and then it was gone as I cried, “You!” and “You!” again.

  There was an immense roundabout, a thousand millraces of darkness from which a single flame ignited near my mouth and one of the strange beasts cursed, seeing me, and shouted, “You, you scared her away! You!”

  And hands were thrust to snatch at me until I fell back.

  “No!” I turned and leaped, hoping to hell it was toward the sea and not the ghosts.

  I stumbled and fell. My flashlight skittered. Christ, I thought, if I can’t get it back—!

  I scrambled on hands and knees.

  “Oh, please, please!”

  And my fingers closed on the flashlight, which resurrected my flesh, got me upright, swaying with the black flood behind, and I broke into a drunken run. Don’t fall, I thought, hold the light like a rope to pull you, don’t fall, don’t look back! Are they close, are they near, are there others waiting? Great God!

  At which moment the most glorious sound cracked the channel. There was an illumination ahead like the sunrise at heaven’s door, a loud chant of car horn, an avalanche of thunder! A car.

  People like me think in film-bit flashes, over in an instant, dumb in retrospect, but a lightning bolt of exhilaration. John Ford, I thought, Monument Valley! Indians! But now, the damn cavalry!

  For ahead, in full plunge from the sea …