Let's All Kill Constance Page 5

“Mind the quicksand !” Father Rattigan called after me as I raced out the doors.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the way across town I was a hot-air balloon full of Great Expectations. Crumley kept hitting my elbow to make me calm down, calm down. But we had to get to that other church.

  “Church!” Crumley muttered. “Since when do double features sideline the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?”

  “King Kong! That’s when! 1932! Fay Wray kissed my cheek.”

  “Holy mackerel.” Crumley switched on the car radio.

  “—afternoon—” a voice said. “Mount Lowe—”

  “Listen!” I said, my stomach a chunk of ice.

  The voice said, “Death … police … Clarence Rattigan … victim …” A flare of static. “Freak accident … victim smothered, smothered … old newspapers. Recall brothers in Bronx? Saved stacks of old papers that fell and killed the brothers? Newspapers …”

  “Turn it off.”

  Crumley turned it off.

  “That poor lost soul,” I said.

  “Was he really that lost?”

  “Lost as you can get without giving it the old heave-ho.”

  “You want to drive by?”

  “Drive by,” I said at last, making noises.

  “You didn’t know him,” said Crumley. “Why those noises?”

  The last police car was leaving. The morgue van had long since left. A lone policeman on his motorcycle stood at the bottom of Mount Lowe. Crumley leaned out his window.

  “Anything to keep us from driving up?”

  “Just me,” said the officer. “But I’m leaving.”

  “Were there any reporters?”

  “No, it wasn’t worth it.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and made more noises.

  “Okay, okay,” Crumley groused, “wait till I get this damn car aimed before you upchuck your hairball.”

  I waited and fell apart, silently.

  The motorcycle policeman left, and it was a long late afternoon journey up to the ruined temple of Karnak, the destroyed Valley of the Kings, and lost Cairo, or so I said along the way.

  “Lord Carnarvon dug up a king, we bury one. I wouldn’t mind a grave like this.”

  “Bull Montana,” said Crumley. “He was a wrestling cowboy. Bull.”

  At the top of the hill there were no ruins, just a vast pyramid of newspapers being rummaged by a bulldozer driven by an illiterate. The guy bucking the wheeled machine had no idea he was reaping Hearst’s outcries, ’29, or McCormick’s eruptions in the Chicago Tribune, ’32. Roosevelt, Hitler, Baby Rose Marie, Marie Dressler, Aimee Semple McPherson, one, twice buried, forever shy. I cursed.

  Crumley had to restrain me from leaping out to seize VICTORY IN EUROPE or HITLER DEAD IN BUNKER or AIMEE WALKS FROM SEA.

  “Easy!” Crumley muttered.

  “But look what he’s doing to all that priceless stuff ! Let go, dammit!”

  I leaped forward to grab two or three front pages.

  Roosevelt was elected on one, dead on another, reelected on the third, and then there was Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima at dawn.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, pressing the damned lovely things to my ribs.

  Crumley picked up “I WILL RETURN,” SAYS MACARTHUR. “I get your point,” he admitted. “He was a bastard, but the best emperor Japan ever had.”

  The guy minding the grim reaping machine had stopped and was eyeing us like more trash.

  Crumley and I jumped back. He plowed through toward a truck already heaped with MUSSOLINI BOMBS ETHIOPIA, JEANETTE MACDONALD MARRIES, AL JOLSON DEAD.

  “Fire hazard!” he yelled.

  I watched a half-hundred years of time pour into the Dumpster.

  “Dry grass and newsprint, firetraps,” I mused. “My God, my God, what if—”

  “What if what?”

  “In some future date people use newspapers, or books, to start fires?”

  “They already do,” said Crumley. “Winter mornings, my dad shoved newspaper under the coal in our stove and struck a match.”

  “Okay, but what about books?”

  “No damn fool would use a book to start a fire. Wait. You got that look says you’re about to write a ten-ton encyclopedia.”

  “No,” I said. “Maybe a story with a hero who smells of kerosene.”

  “Some hero.”

  We walked over a killing field of littered days, nights, years, half a century. The papers crunched like cereal underfoot.

  “Jericho,” I said.

  “Someone bring a trumpet here, and blow a blast?”

  “A trumpet blast or a yell. There’s been a lot of yelling lately. At Queen Califia’s, or here, for King Tut.”

  “And then there’s the priest. Rattigan,” Crumley said. “Didn’t Constance try to blow his church down? But hell, look, we’re standing on Omaha Beach, Normandy, over Churchill’s war rooms, holding Chamberlain’s damned umbrella. You soaking it up?”

  “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 Chemist
ry 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 your 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 Shangrila, 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.