Let's All Kill Constance Read online

“Why not?”

  “Because—” I stopped, gasped, and then blurted out, “I need you!”

  “Crud.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I heard,” he muttered. “Christ.”

  And at last, “Meet you down by Rattigan’s. Around sunset. When things come out of the surf to get you.”

  “Rattigan’s.”

  He hung up before I could.

  Chapter Seven

  Everything by night, that’s the ticket. Nothing at noon; the sun is too bright, the shadows wait. The sky burns so nothing dares move. There is no fun in sunlit exposure. Midnight brings fun when the shadows under trees lift their skirts and glide. Wind arrives. Leaves fall. Footsteps echo. Beams and floorboards creak. Dust sifts from tombstone angel wings. Shadows soar like ravens. Before dawn, the streetlights die, the town goes briefly blind.

  It is then that all good mysteries start, all adventures linger. Dawn never was. Everyone holds their breath to bind the darkness, save the terror, nail the shadows.

  So it was only proper that as dark waves were striking a darker shore, I met Crumley on the sand, out front of her big white Arabian-fortress beach house. We walked up and looked in.

  All the doors still stood wide, bright lights burned inside while Gershwin punched holes in a player-piano roll in 1928 to be played again and again, triple time, with no one listening except me and Crumley walking through lots of music, but no Constance.

  I opened my mouth to apologize for calling Crumley.

  “Drink your gin and shut up.” Crumley thrust a beer at me.

  “Now,” he went on, “what the hell does all this mean?” He thumbed the pages of Rattigan’s personal Book of the Dead. “Here, here, and over here.”

  There were red ink marks circling a half-dozen names, with deeply indented crucifixes freshly inscribed.

  “Constance guessed, and so did I, that those marks meant the owners of those names were still alive, but maybe not for long. What do you think?”

  “I don’t,” said Crumley. “This is your picnic. I was all set to head for Yosemite this weekend, and you show up like a film producer who improves the flavor of screenplays by peeing on every other scene. I’d better run for Yosemite right now; you got that look of a wild rabbit with intuitions.”

  “Hold on.” For he was starting to move. “Don’t you want to prove or disprove which of these names are still kicking or which dropped dead?”

  I grabbed the book, then tossed it back so he had to catch. It fell open at one page with a more-than-enormous crucifix by an almost-circus-banner name. Crumley scowled. I read the name upside down: Califia. Queen Califia. Bunker Hill. No address. But there was a phone number.

  Crumley could not take his eyes off it, scowling.

  “Know where that is?” I said.

  “Bunker Hill, hell, I know, I know. I was born a few blocks north of there. A real free-for-all stewpot of Mexicans, Gypsies, stovepipe-out-the-window Irish, white trash and black. Used to go by there to look in at Callahan and Ortega, Funeral Directors. Hoped to see real bodies. My God, Callahan and Ortega, what names, right there in the middle of Juarez II, Guadalajara bums, dead flowers from Rosarita Beach, Dublin whores. Crud!” Crumley suddenly yelled, furious at listening to his own travel talk, half selling himself on my next expedition. “Did you hear me? Did you listen? God!”

  “I heard,” I said. “So why don’t we just call one of those red circle numbers to see what’s aboveground or below?”

  And before he could protest, I seized the book and ran up the dune to Rattigan’s outdoor pool, brightly lit, with an extension phone on a glass-top patio table, waiting. I didn’t dare look at Crumley, who had not moved as I dialed.

  A voice answered from long miles away. That number was no longer in service. Damn, I thought, and then, Wait!

  I dialed information swiftly, got a number, dialed it, and held the phone out so Crumley could hear the voice:

  “Callahan and Ortega, good evening,” the voice said, a full rich ripe brogue from center stage of Abbey Theatre. I smiled wildly. I saw Crumley, below, twitch.

  “Callahan and Ortega,” the voice repeated, louder now, its temper roused. A long pause. I stayed mum. “Who the hell is this?”

  I hung up before Crumley reached me.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, hooked.

  “Two blocks, maybe three, from where you were born?”

  “Four, you conniving bastard.”

  “Well?” I said.

  Crumley grabbed Rattigan’s book.

  “Almost but not quite a Book of the Dead?” he said.

  “Want to try another number?” I opened the book, turned, and stopped under the Rs. “Here’s one, oh Lord yes, even better than Queen Califia.”

  Crumley squinted. “Rattigan, Mount Lowe. What kind of Rattigan lives up on Mount Lowe? That’s where the big red trolley that’s been dead half my lifetime used to take thousands up for picnics.”

  Memory shadowed Crumley’s face.

  I touched another name.

  “Rattigan. St. Vibiana’s Cathedral.”

  “What kind of Rattigan, holy jumping Jesus, hides out in St. Vibiana’s Cathedral?”

  “Spoken like a born-again Catholic.” I studied Crumley’s now-permanent scowl. “Want to know? I’m on my way.”

  I took three false steps before Crumley swore. “How the hell you going to get there with no license and no car?”

  I kept my back turned. “You’re going to take me.”

  There was a long brooding silence.

  “Right?” I prompted.

  “You know how in hell to find where the Mount Lowe trolley once ran?”

  “I was carried up by my folks when I was eighteen months old.”

  “That means you can show the way?”

  “Total recall.”

  “Shut up,” said Crumley as he tossed a half-dozen bottles of beer into the jalopy. “Get in the car.”

  We got in, left Gershwin to punch piano-roll holes in Paris, and drove away.

  “Don’t say anything,” said Crumley. “Just nod your head left, right, or straight ahead.”

  Chapter Eight

  “I’ll be damned if I know why in hell I’m doing this,” Crumley muttered, almost driving on the wrong side of the street. “I said, I’ll be damned if I know why in hell—”

  “I heard you,” I said, watching the mountains and the foothills coming closer.

  “You know who you remind me of ?” Crumley snorted. “My first and only wife, who knew how to flimflam me with her shapes and sizes and big smiles.”

  “Do I flimflam you?”

  “Say you don’t and I’ll throw you out of the car. When you see me coming, you sit and pretend to be working a crossword puzzle. You’re maybe four words into it before I grab your pencil and shove you outta the way.”

  “Did I ever do that, Crumley?”

  “Don’t get me mad. You watching the street signs? Do so. Now. Tell me, why are you heading this damn-fool expedition?”

  I looked at the Rattigan phone book in my lap. “She was running away, she said. From Death, from one of the names in this book. Maybe one of them sent it to her as a spoiled gift. Or maybe she was running toward them, like we’re doing, heading for one to see if he’s the sinner who dared to send tombstone dictionaries to impressionable child actresses.”

  “Rattigan’s no child,” Crumley groused.

  “She is. She wouldn’t’ve been so great up on the screen if she hadn’t kept one heckuva lot of her Meglin Kiddie self locked up in all those sexual acrobatics. It’s not the old Rattigan who’s scared here; it’s the schoolgirl in panic running through the dark forest, Hollywood, full of monsters.”

  “You whipping up another of your Christmas fruitcakes full of nuts?”

  “Does it sound like it?”

  “No comment. Why would one of these red-lined friends send her two books full of lousy memories?”

  “Why not? Constanc
e loved a lot of people in her time. So, years later, one way or another, a lot of people hate her. They got rejected, left behind, forgotten. She got famous. They were found with the trash by the side of the road. Or maybe they’re real old now and dying, and before they go they want to spoil things.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like me,” Crumley said.

  “God help me, I hope not. I mean—”

  “It’s okay. You’ll never be Crumley, just like I’ll never be Jules Verne Junior. Where in hell are we?”

  I glanced up quickly.

  “Hey!” I said. “This is it. Mount Lowe! Where the great old red trolley train fell down dead, a long time ago.

  “Professor Lowe,” I said, reading some offhand memory from the dark side of my eyelids, “was the man who invented balloon photography during the Civil War.”

  “Where did that come from?” Crumley exclaimed.

  “It just came,” I said, unsettled.

  “You’re full of useless information.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, offended. “We’re here at Mount Lowe, right? And it’s named for Professor Lowe and his Toonerville Trolley scaling its heights, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” Crumley said.

  “Well then, Professor Lowe invented hot-air balloon photography that helped catch enemy images in the great war of the states. Balloons, and a new invention, trains, won for the North.”

  “Okay, okay,” Crumley grumbled. “I’m outta the car and ready to climb.”

  I leaned out the car window and looked at the long weed-choked path that went up and up a long incline in evening’s gathering shadows.

  I shut my eyes and recited. “It’s three miles to the top. You really want to walk?”

  Crumley glared at the foothill.

  “Hell, no.” He got back in the car and banged the door shut. “Is there any chance we could run off the edge of that damn narrow path? We’d be goners.”

  “Always the chance. Onward!”

  Crumley edged our jalopy to the foot of the mostly blind path, cut the engine, got out, walked over, kicked some dirt, and pulled some weeds.

  “Hallelujah!” he exclaimed. “Iron, steel! The old rail track, didn’t bother to yank it out, just buried it!”

  “See?!” I said.

  His face crimson, Crumley plunged back in, almost submerging the car.

  “Okay, smart-ass! Damn car won’t start!”

  “Put your foot on the starter!”

  “Damn!” Crumley stomped the floorboard. The car shimmied.

  “Double-damn smart-ass kids!”

  We ascended.

  Chapter Nine

  The way up the mountain was a double wilderness. The dry season had come early and burned the wild grass to sere crispness. In the rapidly fading light the whole hillside up to the peak was the color of wheat, fried by the sun. As we rode, it crackled. Two weeks before, someone had tossed a match and the whole foothill had exploded in flame. It was headlined in the papers and lit the television news, the flames were so pretty. But now the fire was gone and the chars and dryness with it. There was a dead-fire smell as Crumley and I threaded the lost path winding up Mount Lowe.

  On the way, Crumley said, “It’s good you can’t see over my side. A thousand-foot drop.”

  I clutched my knees.

  Crumley noticed. “Well, maybe only a five-hundred-foot drop.”

  I shut my eyes and recited off my clenched eyelids.

  “The Mount Lowe railway was part electric, part cable car.”

  Crumley, made curious, said, “And?”

  I unclenched my knees.

  “The railway opened July Fourth, 1893, with free cake and ice cream and thousands of riders. The Pasadena City Brass Band rode the first car playing ‘Hail, Columbia.’ But considering their passage into the clouds, they had shifted to ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’ which made at least ten thousand people along the way cry. Later in the ascension they decided to do ‘Upward, Always Upward’ as they reached the heights. They were followed in three cable cars by the Los Angeles Symphony; the violins in one car, the brass in a second, and the timpani and woodwinds in the third car. In the confusion, the conductor was left behind with his baton. Later in the day the Salt Lake City Mormon Tabernacle Choir ascended, also in three cars; sopranos in one, the baritones in another, and the bass in the third. They sang ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ which seemed very appropriate as they vanished in the mist. It was reported that ten thousand miles of red, white, and blue bunting covered all of the trolleys and the trains and the cable cars. When the day was finally over, one semihysterical woman who admired Professor Lowe for what he had done to bring about the creation of the Mount Lowe railway and its taverns and hotels was quoted as saying, ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow and also praise Professor Lowe,’ which made everyone cry again,” I babbled on.

  Crumley said, “I’ll be damned.”

  I added, “The Pacific Electric Railway ran to Mount Lowe, the Pasadena Ostrich Farm, Seleg Lion Zoo, San Gabriel Mission, Monrovia, Baldwin’s Ranch, and Whittier.”

  Crumley mumbled under his breath and drove on in silence.

  Taking that as a hint, I said, “Are we there yet?”

  “Cowardly custard,” said Crumley. “Open your eyes.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “I think we’re there.”

  And we were. For there stood the ruins of the old rail station, and beyond that, a few charred struts of the burned pavilion.

  I got out slowly and stood with Crumley surveying miles of land that went forever to the sea.

  “Cortés never saw better,” said Crumley. “View’s great. Makes you wonder why they didn’t rebuild.”

  “Politics.”

  “Always is. Now, where in hell do we find someone named Rattigan in a place like this?”

  “There!”

  Some eighty feet away, behind a huge spread of pepper trees, was a small cottage half-sunk in the earth. Fire hadn’t touched it, but rain had worn its paint and battered its roof.

  “There’s got to be a body in there,” Crumley said as we walked toward it.

  “Isn’t there always a body, or else why come see?”

  “Go check. I’ll stand here hating myself for not bringing more booze.”

  “Some detective.” I ambled over to the cottage and had one helluva time yanking its door wide. When it finally whined and gave way, I lurched back, afraid, and peered in.

  “Crumley,” I said at last.

  “Yeah?” he said, sixty feet away.

  “Come see.”

  “A body?” he said.

  “Even better,” I said in awe.

  Chapter Ten

  We entered a labyrinth of newsprint. A labyrinth; hell, a catacomb with narrow passages between stacks of old newspapers—the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle News, the Detroit Free Press. Five feet on the left, six on the right, and a pathway between which you might jockey through, fearful of avalanches that could crush and kill.

  “Holy magoly!” I breathed.

  “You can say that again,” Crumley groused. “Christ, there must be ten thousand Sunday and daily papers stacked here, in layers—look, yellow down below, white on top. And not just one stack, ten dozen—my God, a hundred!”

  For indeed the catacomb of newsprint hollowed back through twilight shadow to curve out of sight.

  It was a moment, I later said, like Lord Carnarvon opening Tut’s tomb in 1922. All those ancient headlines, those obituary piles, that led to what? More news stacks and more beyond. Crumley and I sidled through with hardly enough space for bellies or behinds.

  “God,” I whispered, “if ever a real earthquake hit—”

  “It did!” came a voice from far down the stacked tunnel of print. A mummy cried. “Kicked the stacks! Almost pancaked me!”

  “Who’s there?” I called. “Where in hell are you?”

  “A great maze, yeah?” The mummy’s voice yelled i
n glee. “Built it myself ! Morning extra by night final, race specials, Sunday comics, you name it! Forty years! A museum library of news, unfit to print. Keep moving! Around the bend to your left. I’m here somewhere!”

  “Move!” Crumley panted. “There’s gotta be a space with fresh air!”

  “That’s it!” the dry voice called. “You’re close. Bear left. Don’t smoke! Damn place’s a firetrap of headlines: ‘Hitler Takes Power,’ ‘Mussolini Bombs Ethiopia for Kindling,’ ‘Roosevelt Dead,’ ‘Churchill Builds Iron Curtain,’ swell, huh?”

  We turned a final corner among tall flapjack stacks of print to find a clearing in the forest.

  On the far side of the clearing was an army cot. On the cot lay what seemed a long bundle of beef jerky or a mummy rampant from the earth. There was a strong smell. Not dead, I thought, not alive.

  I approached the cot slowly, with Crumley behind. I knew the odor now. Not death, but the great unwashed.

  The rag bundle stirred. Some ancient blanket shreds flaked from a face like watermarks on mud shallows. A faint crack of light glinted between two withered lids.

  “Pardon my not rising,” the withered mouth trembled. “Chez Monsieur from Armentières, haven’t got up in forty years.” It cackled a cackle that almost killed it. It began to cough.

  “No, no, I’m okay,” it whispered. The head fell back. “Where the hell you been?”

  “Where …?”

  “I been expecting you!” said the mummy. “What year is it? 1932? 1946? 1950?”

  “You’re getting warmer.”

  “1960. Howzat?”

  “Bull’s-eye,” said Crumley.

  “I’m not all crackers.” The old man’s dry dust mouth quavered. “You bring my vittles?”

  “Vittles?”

  “No, no, couldn’t be. It’s a kid, totes the dog food through that Grub Street newsprint alley, can by can, or the whole damn thing falls. You’re not him—or he?”

  We glanced behind and shook our heads.

  “How you like my penthouse? Original meaning: place where they used to pent up people so they couldn’t run amok. We gave it a different meaning and raised the rent. Where was I? Oh, yeah. How you like this joint?”