Let's All Kill Constance Read online

My salvation, an old wreck.

  And half standing up front … Crumley.

  Yelling the worst curses he had ever yelled, cursing me with the foulest curses ever, but glad he had found me and then cursing this damn fool again.

  “Don’t kill me!” I cried.

  The car braked near my feet.

  “Not till we get outta here!” Crumley shrieked.

  The darkness, lit by headlights, reared back. I was frozen with Crumley blaring the horn, waving arms, spitting teeth, going blind.

  “You’re lucky this damn buggy made it in! What gives?”

  I stared back into the darkness.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then you won’t be needing a lift!” Crumley gunned the gas.

  I jumped in and landed so hard the jalopy shook.

  Crumley grabbed my chin. “You okay?”

  “Now, yes!”

  “We gotta back out!”

  “Back out!” I cried. The shadows loomed. “At fifty miles an hour?”

  “Sixty!”

  Crumley glared at the night.

  “Satchel Paige said don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.”

  A dozen figures lurched into the light.

  “Now!” I yelled.

  We left …

  At seventy miles an hour, backward.

  Crumley yelled, “Henry called, said where the damn dumb stupid Martian was!”

  “Henry,” I gasped.

  “Fritz called! Said you were twice as stupid as Henry said!”

  “I am! Faster!”

  Faster.

  I could hear the surf.

  Chapter Forty-One

  We motored out of the storm drain and I looked south one hundred yards and gasped. “Ohmigod, look!”

  Crumley looked.

  “There’s Rattigan’s place, two hundred feet away. How come we never noticed the storm drain came out so close?”

  “We never used the storm drain before as Route 66.”

  “So if we could take it from Grauman’s Chinese all the way here, Constance could have gone from here to Grauman’s.”

  “Only if she was nuts. Hell. She was a Brazilian nut factory. Look.”

  There were a dozen narrow swerving marks in the sand. “Bicycle tracks. Bike it in one hour, tops.”

  “God, no, I don’t see her on a bike.”

  I stood up in the jalopy to peer back at the tunnel.

  “She’s there. I doubt she’s moved. She’s still in there, going somewhere else, not here. Poor Constance.”

  “Poor?” Crumley erupted. “Tough as a rhino. Keep bellyaching about that five-and-dime floozy, I’ll phone your wife to come crack your dog biscuits!”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “No?” Crumley gunned the car the rest of the way out on the shore. “Three days of maniac running in and out of lousy L.A. palmistry parlors, upstairs Chinese balconies, climbing Mount Lowe! A parade of losers, all because of an A-1 skirt who gets the Oscar for loss-leading. Wrong? Rip the roll from my pianola if I’ve played the wrong tune!”

  “Crumley! In that storm drain, I think I saw her. Could I just say ‘go to hell’?”

  “Sure!”

  “Liar,” I said. “You drink vodka, pee apple juice. I’ve got your number.”

  Crumley gunned the motor. “What’re you getting at?”

  “You’re an altar boy.”

  “Christ, let me move this wreck out front of that damn fool sailor’s delight!”

  He drove fast, then slow, eyes half-shut, teeth gritted. “Well?”

  I swallowed hard and said, “You’re a boy soprano. You made your dad and mom proud at midnight mass. Hell, I’ve seen the ghost under your skin, in movies where you pretended your eyes weren’t wet. A Catholic camel with a broken back. Great sinners, Crum, make great saints. No one’s so bad they don’t deserve a second chance.”

  “Rattigan’s had ninety!”

  “Would Jesus have kept count?”

  “Damn, yes!”

  “No, because some far-off late night, you’ll call a priest to bless you and he’ll carry you back to some Christmas night when your dad was proud and your ma cried and as you shut your eyes you’ll be so damned glad to be home again you won’t have to go pee to hide your tears. You still haven’t given up hope. Know why?”

  “Why, dammit?”

  “Because I want it for you, Crum. Want you to be happy, want you to come home to something, anything, before it’s too late. Let me tell you a story—”

  “Why are you blabbing at a time like this? You just barely got away from a tribe of lunatics. What did you see in that flood channel?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not sure.”

  “Ohmigod, wait!” Crumley rummaged in the glove compartment and with a cry of relief un-corked a small flask and drank. “If I have to sit here with the tide going out and your hot air rising—speak.”

  I spoke: “When I was twelve a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, came to my hometown. He touched me with his flaming sword and yelled, ‘Live forever!’ Why did he tell me that, Crumley? Was there something in my face, the way I acted, stood, sat, talked, what? All I know is somehow, burning me with his great eyes, he gave me my future. Leaving the carnival, I stood by the carousel, heard the calliope playing ‘Beautiful Ohio,’ and I wept. I knew something incredible had happened, something wonderful and nameless. Within three weeks, twelve years old, I started to write. I have written every day since. How come, Crumley, how come?”

  “Here,” said Crumley. “Finish this.”

  I drank the rest of the vodka.

  “How come?” I said quietly again.

  Now it was Crumley’s turn: “Because he saw you were a romantic sap, a Dumpster for magic, a cloud-walker who found shadows on ceilings and said they were real. Christ, I don’t know. You always look like you’ve just showered even if you rolled in dog doo. I can’t stand all your innocence. Maybe that’s what Electrico saw. Where’s that vodka? Oh yeah, gone. You done?”

  “No,” I said. “Since Mr. Electrico pointed me in the right direction, shouldn’t I pay back? Do I keep Mr. Electrico to myself, or let him help me save her?”

  “Psychic crap!”

  “Hunches. I don’t know any other way to live. When I got married friends warned Maggie I wasn’t going anywhere. I said, ‘I’m going to the Moon and Mars, want to come along?’ And she said yes. So far, it hasn’t been so bad, has it? And on your way to a ‘bless me, Father,’ and a happy death, can’t you find it in your heart to bring Rattigan?”

  Crumley stared straight ahead.

  “You mean all that?”

  He reached over and touched under my eyes and brought his fingers back to his tongue.

  “The real stuff,” he murmured. “Salt. Your wife said you cry at phone books,” he said quietly.

  “Phone books full of people lost in graveyards, maybe. If I quit now, I’d never forgive myself. Or you, if you made me stop.”

  After a long moment Crumley shifted out of the car. “Wait,” he said, not looking at me. “I got to go pee.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  He came back after a long while.

  “You sure know how to hurt a guy,” he said as he climbed back into the jalopy.

  “Just stir, don’t shake.”

  Crumley cocked his head at me. “You’re a queer egg.”

  “You’re another.”

  We drove slowly along the shore toward Rattigan’s. I was silent.

  “You got another hairball?” Crumley said.

  “Why is it,” I said, “someone like Constance is a lightning bolt, performing seal, high-wire frolicker, wild laughing human, and at the same time she’s the devil incarnate, an evil cheater at life’s loaded deck?”

  “Go ask Alexander the Great,” said Crumley. “Look at Attila the Hun, who loved dogs; Hitler, too. Bone up on Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Mao, hell’s Anvil Chorus. Rommel, good family man. How do you cradle cats and cut throa
ts, bake cookies and people? How come we love Richard the Third, who dumped kids in wine casks? How come TV is all Al Capone reruns? God won’t say.”

  “I don’t ask. He turned us loose. It’s up to us, once He took off the leash. Who wrote, ‘Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s way towards Man?’ I rewrote it and added, ‘And Freud spoils kids and spares the rod, to justify Man’s ways toward God.’”

  Crumley snorted. “Freud was a nut loose in a fruit patch. I always believed smart-ass punks need their teeth punched.”

  “My dad never broke my teeth.”

  “That’s because you’re a half-stale Christmas fruitcake, the kind no one eats.”

  “But Constance is beautiful!”

  “You mistake energy for beauty. Overseas, French girls knocked me flat. They blink, wave, dance, stand on their heads to prove they’re alive. Hell, Constance is all battery acid and short circuit. If she ever slows down she’ll get—”

  “Ugly? No!”

  “Gimme those!” He seized the glasses off my nose and peered through them.

  “Rose-colored! How do things look without them?”

  “Nothing’s there.”

  “Great! There’s not much worth seeing!”

  “There’s Paris in the spring. Paris in the rain. Paris on New Year’s Eve.”

  “You been there?”

  “I saw the movies. Paris. Gimme.”

  “I’ll just keep these until you take waltz lessons from blind Henry.” Crumley shoved my glasses in his pocket.

  As we pulled our jalopy up on the shore in front of the white château, we saw two dark shapes by her oceanside pool, under the umbrella, to keep off the moonlight.

  Crumley and I trudged up the dune and peered in at Blind Henry and angry Fritz Wong. There were martinis laid out on a tray.

  “I knew,” Henry said, “after that storm drain you’d seek refreshment. Grab. Drink.”

  We grabbed and drank.

  Fritz soaked his monocle in vodka, thrust it in his stare, and said, “That’s better!” And then he finished the drink.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  I went ’round, placing camp chairs by the pool.

  Crumley watched with a dour eye and said, “Let me guess. This is the finale of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, and Poirot’s got all the usual suspects stashed poolside.”

  “Bull’s-eye.”

  “Proceed.”

  I proceeded.

  “This chair here is for the Mount Lowe collector of old newspapers.”

  “Who will testify in absentia?”

  “In absentia. This next chair is for Queen Califia, long gone, with her palmistry and head bumps.”

  I kept moving. “Third chair: Father Rattigan. Fourth chair: Grauman’s Chinese mile-high projectionist. Fifth chair: J. W. Bradford, a.k.a. Tallulah, Garbo, Swanson, Colbert. Sixth: Professor Quickly, a.k.a. Scrooge, Nicholas Nickleby, Richard the Third. Seventh chair: me. Eighth chair: Constance.”

  “Hold on.”

  Crumley got up and pinned his badge on my shirt.

  “We going to sit here,” said Fritz, “and listen to a fourth-rate Nancy Drew—”

  “Stash your monocle,” said Crumley.

  Fritz stashed his monocle.

  “Now,” said Crumley, “junior?”

  Junior moved behind the chairs.

  “For starters, I’m Rattigan running in the rain with two Books of the Dead. Some already dead, some about to die.”

  I laid the two books on the glass-top table.

  “We all know now that Quickly, in a spurt of nostalgic madness, sent the one book, with all the dead people, to frighten Constance. She came running from her past, her memories of a fast, furious, and destructive life.”

  “You can say that again,” said Crumley.

  I waited.

  “Sorry,” said Crumley.

  I picked up the second book, Constance’s more personal, recent phone lists.

  “But what if Constance, hit by the old Book of the Dead, got wired back into her griefs, her losses in that past, and decided, in order to make do with it, she had to destroy it, person by person, one by one. What if she red-lined the names and forgot she had done it?”

  “What if?” Crumley sighed.

  “Let the idiot express his delight.” Fritz Wong tucked his monocle back in his eye and leaned forward. “So the Rattigan goes to kill, maim, or at least threaten her own past, ja?” he said with heavy Germanic concern.

  “Is that the way the next scene plays?” I asked.

  “Action,” said Fritz, amused.

  I swayed behind the first empty chair.

  “Here we are at the dead end of the old trolley-tram line on Mount Lowe.”

  Fritz and Crumley nodded, seeing the mummy there, wrapped in headlines.

  “Wait.” Blind Henry squinted. “Okay, I’m there.”

  “Her first husband is there, her first big mistake. So she goes up to swipe the newspapers with all her old selves filed away. She grabs the papers, like I did, and gives a final yell. Whether she pushed the landslide of newsprint, or gave one last shriek, who knows? Regardless, the Mount Lowe trolley master drowned in a bad-news avalanche. Okay?”

  I looked over at Crumley, whose mouth gaped with his “okay.” He nodded, as did Fritz. Henry sensed this and gave the go-ahead.

  “Chair number two. Bunker Hill. Queen Califia. Predictor of futures, insurer of fates.”

  I held on to the chair as if I pushed that massive elephant on roller skates.

  “Constance shouted outside her door. Califia wasn’t murdered any more than that Mount Lowe Egyptian relic was. Yelled at, sure, by Rattigan, telling Califia to take back all her lousy predictions that insured the future. Califia had unrolled a papyrus road map, Constance followed, blind as a bat—sorry, Henry—all enthusiasm. Would Califia lie? No! Was the future wondrous? You betcha! Now, late in the game, Constance wanted retractions. Califia would have retracted, told new lies, and gone on living, but alarmed, fell downstairs into her grave. Not murder, but panic.”

  “So much for Califia,” said Crumley, trying to hide his approval.

  “Scene three, take one,” said Fritz.

  “Scene three, take one, chair number three.” I moved. “This here is the confessional booth, St. Vibiana’s.”

  Fritz scooched his chair closer, his monocle a lighthouse flash, searching my small private stage. He chopped his head at me to continue.

  “And here’s Rattigan’s bighearted brother, trying to lead her along the straight and narrow. When Califia said ‘left,’ he yelled ‘right,’ and maybe after years of storms of brutal sin, he threw up his hands, tossed her out of the church. But she came back, raving, demanding absolution, screaming her demands, purify me, forgive me, your own flesh, give way, give in, but he clapped his hands over his ears and yelled against her yell, and his yells, not hers, struck him dead.”

  “So you say,” said Fritz, one eye shut, the fire from his monocle stabbing. “Prove it. If we’re going to shoot this like a goddamn film, write me the moment of truth. Tell how you know the priest killed himself with his own rage, yes?”

  “Who the hell’s the detective here?” Crumley cut in.

  “The boy wonder is,” drawled Fritz, not looking at him, still shooting lightning bolts of optical glass at me. “He gets hired or fired by what he next claims.”

  “I’m not applying for a job,” I said.

  “You’ve already got it,” said Fritz. “Or get thrown out on your ass. I’m the studio head and you’re plea-bargaining. How do you know the priest was self-murdered?”

  I exhaled.

  “Because I heard him breathe, watched his face, saw him run. He couldn’t stand Constance diving in the surf one way, to come out another. She was hot desert air, he was fog. Collision. Lightning. Bodies.”

  “All from one priest and one bad sister?”

  “Saint. Sinner,” I said.

  Fritz Wong stiffened with a glow in his
face and a most ungodly smile.

  “You got the job. Crumley?”

  Crumley reared back from Fritz but at last nodded. “As proof? It’ll do. Next?”

  I moved on to the next chair.

  “Here we are at Grauman’s Chinese, up high, late night, film running, figures on the screen, pictures on the wall. All of Rattigan’s former selves nailed, ready to be nabbed. And the one man who really knows her, bum to belly button, her dad, keeper of the unholy flame, but he doesn’t want her either, so she busts in and swipes the pictures that prove her past. She’s got to burn those, too, because she doesn’t like all her former selves. The final bust-in puts her pa in shock, like all the rest. Torn both ways—after all, it is his daughter—he lets the pictures go but runs the film on a continuous roundabout reel, Molly, Dolly, Sally, Holly, Gala, Willa, Sue … The reel’s still running and the faces lit when we arrive too late to save him or the swiped photos. Unmurder number four …”

  “So J. Wallington Bradford a.k.a. Tallulah Bankhead cum Crawford cum Colbert is still alive, and he’s not a victim?” said Crumley. “The same goes for quick-change artist Quickly?”

  “Alive but not for long. They’re as flimsy as kites in a long storm. Constance ranted at them—”

  “Because?” said Crumley.

  “They taught her all the ways to not be herself,” said Fritz, proud of his insight. “Don’t do this, do that, don’t do that, do this. Richard the Third tells you how to be Lear’s daughter, Lady Macbeth, Medea. One size fits all. So she became Electra, Juliet, Lady Godiva, Ophelia, Cleopatra. Bradford said. Rattigan did. Same with Quickly. See Connie run! She had to show up on both their doorsteps to disrobe, junk her lines, burn her notices. Can teachers unteach? Constance demanded. ‘Who is Constance, what is she?’ was the essence of her declaration. Being only forward teachers, they didn’t know how to teach backward. So, Constance was driven to—”

  “The basement dressing rooms,” I said. “Snatch the pictures from upstairs, sure, but then wipe out the evidence of her former selves on the mirrors. Scrape, erase, eliminate, name by name, year by year.”

  I finished and sipped my drink and shut up.

  “Is the train in Murder on the Orient Express pulling into the station?” said Fritz, lying back full-length like Caesar in his bath.