Let's All Kill Constance Read online

  He fitted the film into the projector and switched on the lamp. The image shot down to flood the big screen.

  On the screen a circus butterfly spun, flirting her gossamer wings, dropping, to pull the bit from her smile, laugh, then run, pursued by white knights and black villains. “Recognize her?”

  “Nope.”

  “Try this.” He spun the film. The screen filled with a smoldering bank of snow fires, a Russian noblewoman, smoking long languid cigarettes, wringing her handkerchief, someone had died or was going to die.

  “Well?” said Clyde Rustler hopefully.

  “Nope.”

  “Try again!”

  The projector lit the darkness with 1923; a tomboy climbing a tree to shake down fruit, laughing, but you could see small crab apples under her shirtfront.

  “Tomboy Sawyer. A girl! Who? Damn!”

  The old man filled the screen with a dozen more images, starting with 1925, ending with 1952, open, shut, mysterious, obvious, light, dark, wild, composed, beautiful, plain, willful, innocent.

  “You don’t know any of those? My God, I’ve racked my brain. There must be some reason why I’ve saved these damned clips. Look at me, dammit! Know how old I am?”

  “Around ninety, ninety-five?”

  “Ten thousand years! Jesus. They found me floating in a basket on the Nile! I fell downhill with the Tablets. I doused the fire in the burning bush. Mark Antony said, ‘Loose the dogs of war’; I loosed the lot. Did I know all these wonders? I wake nights hitting my head to make the jelly beans shake in place. Every time I’ve almost got the answer, I move my head and the damned beans fall. You sure you don’t remember these clips or the faces on the wall? Good grief, we’ve got a mystery!”

  “I was about to say the same. I came up here because someone else came. Maybe that voice that called from down below.”

  “What voice?”

  “Constance Rattigan,” I said.

  I let the fog settle behind his eyes.

  “What’s she got to do with this?” he wondered.

  “Maybe she knows. Last time I saw her she was standing in her own footprints.”

  “And you think she might know who all these faces belong to, what all the names mean? Hold on. Outside the door … I guess it was today. Can’t be yesterday. Today she said, ‘Hand ’em over!”’

  “Hand what over?”

  “Hell, what do you see in this damn empty place worth handing over?”

  I looked at the pictures on the wall. Clyde Rustler saw my look.

  “Why would anyone want those?” he said. “Not worth nothing. Even I don’t know why in hell I nailed them there. Are they wives or some old girlfriends?”

  “How many of each did you have?”

  “I don’t have the fingers to count.”

  “One thing for sure, Constance wanted you to hand ’em over. Was she jealous?”

  “Constance? You got road rage in the streets, she had bed rage. Wanted to grab all my lovelies, whoever in hell they were, and stomp, tear, and burn them. Go on. Finish the wine. I got things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  But he was rethreading the film clips in the projector, fascinated by a thousand and one nights past.

  I moved along the wall and scribbled furiously, writing down the names under all of the pictures, and then said:

  “If Constance comes back, will you let me know?”

  “For the pictures? I’ll throw her downstairs.”

  “Someone else said that. Only it was to hell instead of the second balcony. Why would you throw her?”

  “There’s gotta be a reason, right? Don’t recollect! And why did you say you climbed up here? And what was it you called me?”

  “Clyde Rustler.”

  “Oh, yeah. Him. It just came to me. Did you know I am Constance’s father?”

  “What!?”

  “Constance’s father. I thought I told you before. Now you can leave. Good night.”

  I went out and shut the door on whoever that was and the pictures on the wall, whoever they were.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Downstairs, I edged to the front of the theater and stared down. Then I stepped into the orchestra pit, and edged to the back wall and peered though a door into a long hall that diminished into complete night and a night inside that night, where all the old abandoned dressing rooms were.

  I was tempted to call a name.

  But what if she answered?

  Far off down that black corridor, I thought I heard the sound of a hidden sea, or a river flowing somewhere in the dark.

  I put one foot forward and pulled back.

  I heard that dark ocean heave on an endless shore again.

  Then I turned, and went away up through the great darkness, out of the pit into the aisles with everyone gone, rushing toward the doors leading out to an evening sky most dearly welcome.

  I carried Rattigan’s incredibly small shoes over to her footprints and placed them neatly down to fit.

  At which instant I felt my guardian angel touching my shoulder.

  “You’re back from the dead,” said Crumley. “You can say that again,” I said, staring at the wide red doorway of Grauman’s Chinese with all those film creatures swimming in the dark.

  “She’s in there,” I murmured. “I wish I knew a way to get her out.”

  “Dynamite tied to a bundle of cash might do it.”

  “Crumley!”

  “Sorry, I forgot we were talking about Florence Nightingale.”

  I stepped back. Crumley regarded Rattigan’s tiny shoes lodged in prints put down a long, long time ago.

  “Not exactly ruby slippers,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We rode across town in a warm silence. I tried to describe the great black sea of Grauman’s.

  “There’s this big dressing-room cellar, maybe full of stuff from 1925, 1930. I have a feeling she might be there.”

  “Save your breath,” said Crumley.

  “Someone’s got to go down there to see.”

  “You afraid to go there alone?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “That means damn right! Shut up and ride shotgun.”

  We were soon at Crumley’s. He put a cold beer against my brow.

  “Hold it there until you feel it cure your thinking.”

  I held it there. Crumley switched on the TV and began switching through the channels.

  “I don’t know which is worse,” he said, “your gab or the local TV news.”

  “Father Seamus Rattigan,” the TV said.

  “Hold it!” I cried.

  Crumley switched back.

  “… Vibiana’s Cathedral.”

  And a blizzard of static and snow.

  Crumley hit the damned TV with his fist.

  “… Natural causes. Rumored to be future cardinal …”

  Another snowstorm. And the TV went dead.

  “I been meaning to have it fixed,” said Crumley.

  We both stared at his telephone, telling it to ring.

  We both jumped.

  Because it did!

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was a woman, Father Rattigan’s assistant, Betty Kelly, inarticulate, going down for the third time, begging for mercy.

  I offered what small mercy I had, to come visit.

  “Don’t wait, or I’m dead myself,” she wailed.

  Betty Kelly was out in front of St. Vibiana’s when Crumley and I arrived. We stood for a long moment before she saw us, gave a quick, half-realized wave, and dropped her gaze. We came to stand by her. I introduced Crumley.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She raised her head.

  “Then you are the one was talking to Father!” she said. “Oh, Lord, let’s get inside.”

  The big doors were locked for the night. We went in through a door at the side. Inside she swayed and almost fell. I caught and led her to one of the pews, where she sat breathless.

  “W
e came as quick as we could,” I said.

  “You knew him?” She gasped. “It’s so confusing. You knew someone in common, an acquaintance, a friend?”

  “A relative,” said Crumley. “The same name.”

  “Rattigan! She killed him. Wait!” She grabbed my sleeve.

  For I was on my feet.

  “Sit,” she gasped. “I don’t mean murder. But she killed him.”

  I sat back down, gone cold. Crumley backed off. She clutched my elbow and lowered her voice.

  “She was here, sometimes three times a day, in confession, whispering, then raving. Poor Father looked like he’d been shot when she left, but she hardly left, just stayed until he fell out starving, couldn’t eat, and the liquor cabinet low. He let her rave. Later I’d check the confessional: empty. But the air smelled like it had been hit by lightning. She kept shouting the same thing.”

  “What?”

  “‘I’m killing them, killing them!’ she yelled. ‘And I’ll keep on killing them until I’ve killed them all. Help me to kill them, bless their souls! Then I’ll kill the rest. Kill them all! Get them off my back, out of my life! Then, Father,’ she cried, ‘I’ll be free, clean! But help me bury them so they won’t come back! Help me!’

  “‘Off ! Away!’ Father yelled. ‘My God, what are you asking me to do?’

  “‘Help me put them away, pray over them so they won’t come back, stay dead! Say yes!’

  “‘Get out!’ Father cried, and then she said worse.”

  “What?”

  “She said, ‘Then damn you, damn, damn, damn you to hell!’ Her voice was so loud, people left. I could hear her weeping. The Father must have been in a state of shock. Then I heard footsteps running in the dark. I waited for Father Rattigan to speak, say anything. Then I dared open the door. He was there. And silent because … he was dead.”

  And here the secretary let the tears shed themselves down her cheeks.

  “Poor man,” she said. “Those dreadful words stopped his heart, as they almost stopped mine. We must find that awful woman. Make her take back the words so he can live again. God, what am I saying? Him slumped there as if she had drained his blood. You know her? Tell her she’s done her worst. There, I’ve said it. Now I’ve thrown up, and where do you go to be clean? It’s yours, and sorry I did it to you.”

  I looked down at my suit as if expecting to find her vile upchuck.

  Crumley walked over to the confessional and opened both doors and stared in at the darkness. I came to stand next to him and take a deep breath.

  “Smell it?” said Betty Kelly. “It’s there and ruined. I’ve told the cardinal to tear it down and burn it.”

  I took a final breath. A touch of charcoal and St. Elmo’s fires.

  Crumley closed the doors.

  “It won’t help,” Betty Kelly said. “She’s still there. So is he, poor soul, dead tired and dead. Two coffins, side by side. God help us. I’ve used you all up. You have the same look the poor father had.”

  “Don’t tell me that,” I said weakly.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  And led by Crumley, I beggared my way to the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I couldn’t nap, I couldn’t stay awake, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think. At last, confused and maddened, very late I called St. Vibiana’s again.

  When at last Betty Kelly answered she sounded like she was in a cave of torments.

  “I can’t talk!”

  “Quickly!” I begged. “You remember all she said in the confessional? Anything else important, consequential, different?”

  “Dear God,” said Betty Kelly. “Words and words and words. But wait. She kept saying you must forgive all of us! All of us, every one! There was no one in the booth but her. All of us, she said. You still there?”

  At last I said, “I’m here.”

  “Is there more you want?”

  “Not now.”

  I hung up.

  “All of us,” I whispered. “Forgive all of us!”

  I called Crumley.

  “Don’t say it.” He guessed. “No sleep tonight? And you want me to meet you at Rattigan’s in an hour. You going to search the place?”

  “Just a friendly rummage.”

  “Rummage! What is it, theory or hunch?”

  “Pure reason.”

  “Sell that in a sack for night soil!”

  Crumley was gone.

  “He hang up on you?” I asked my mirror.

  “Hung up on you,” my mirror said.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The phone rang. I picked it up as if it were red-hot.

  “Is that the Martian?” a voice said.

  “Henry!” I cried.

  “That’s me,” the voice said. “It’s crazy, but I miss you, son. Kinda dumb, a colored saying that to an ethnic flying-saucer pilot.”

  “I’ve never heard better,” I said, choking up.

  “Hell,” said Henry, “if you start crying, I’m gone.”

  “Don’t,” I sniffled. “Oh God, Henry, how fine it is to hear your voice!”

  “Which means you’ve milked the cow and got a bucket of I-won’t-say. You want me polite or impolite?”

  “Both, Henry. Things are nuts. Maggie’s back east. I got Crumley here, of course, but—”

  “Which means you need a blind man to find your way out of a cowshed full of cowsheds, right? Hell, let me get my hankie.” He blew his nose. “How soon do you need this all-seeing nose?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “I’m there now! Hollywood, visiting some poor black trash.”

  “You know Grauman’s Chinese?”

  “Hell, yes!”

  “How quickly can you meet me there?”

  “As quick as you want, son. I’ll be standing in Bill Robinson’s tap-dancer shoes. Do we visit another graveyard?”

  “Almost.”

  I called Crumley to say where I was going, that I might be late getting to Rattigan’s, but that I’d be bringing Henry with me.

  “The blind leading the blind,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  He was standing exactly where he said he would be: in Bill Robinson’s “copasetic” dancing footprints, not banished to that long-gone nigger heaven but out front where thousands of passing whites could see.

  His body was erect and quiet, but his shoes were itching around in Bill Robinson’s marks, ever so serenely. His eyes were shut, like his mouth, turned in on a pleased imagination.

  I stood in front of him and exhaled.

  Henry’s mouth burst.

  “Wrigley’s Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, with Wrigley’s Doublemint, Doublemint Gum! Don’t get it on me!” He laughed, seized my elbows. “Lord, boy, you look fine! I don’t have to see to know. You’ve always sounded like some of those people up on the screen!”

  “That comes from sneaking into too many movies.”

  “Let me feel you, boy. Hey, you been drinking lotsa malts!”

  “You look swell, Henry.”

  “I always wondered what I looked like.”

  “The way Bill Robinson sounds is how you shape, Henry.”

  “Am I in his shoes here? Say yes.”

  “A perfect fit. Thanks for coming, Henry.”

  “Had to. It’s one helluva time since we ransacked graveyards! I go to sleep nights running those graves ahead or behind. What kind of graveyard’s here?”

  I glanced at Grauman’s Oriental facade.

  “Ghosts. That’s what I said when I snuck backstage when I was six and stared up at all those black-and-white things leering on the screen. The Phantom playing the organ has his mask yanked off and jumps thirty feet tall to kill you with one stare. Pictures tall and wide and pale and the actors mostly dead. Ghosts.”

  “Did your folks hear you talk like that?”

  “With them? Mum’s the word.”

  “That’s a nice son. I smell incense. Got to be Grauman’s. Real class. No chop-s
uey name.”

  “Here goes, Henry. Let me hold the door.”

  “Hey, it’s dark in there. You bring a flashlight? Always feels good to wave a flashlight and look like we know what we’re doing.”

  “Here’s the flashlight, Henry.”

  “Ghosts, you said?”

  “Séances four times a day for thirty years.”

  “Don’t hold my elbow, makes me feel useless. If I fall, shoot me!”

  And he was off, hardly ricocheting down the aisle toward the orchestra pit and the great spaces beyond and below.

  “It getting darker?” he said. “Let me turn on the flashlight.”

  He switched it on.

  “There.” He smiled. “That’s better!”

  Chapter Thirty

  In the dark unlit basement, there were rooms and rooms and rooms, all with mirrors lining their walls, the reflections reflecting and re-reflecting, emptiness facing emptiness, corridors of lifeless sea.

  We went into the first, biggest one. Henry circled the flashlight like a lighthouse beam.

  “Plenty of ghosts down here.”

  The light hit and sank in the ocean deeps.

  “Not the same as the ghosts upstairs. Spookier. I always wondered about mirrors and that thing called reflection. Another you, right? Four or five feet off, sunk under ice?” Henry reached out to touch the glass. “Someone under there?”

  “You, Henry, and me.”

  “Hot damn. I sure wish I could know that.”

  We moved on along the cold line of mirrors.

  And there they were. More than ghosts. Graffiti on glass. I must have sucked in my breath, for Henry swung his flashlight to my face.

  “You see something I don’t?”

  “My God, yes!”

  I reached out to the first cold Window on Time.