Let's All Kill Constance Page 8

  My finger came away smudged with a faint trace of ancient lipstick.

  “Well?” Henry bent as if to squint at my discovery. “What?”

  “Margot Lawrence. R.I.P. October 1923.”

  “Someone stash her here under glass?”

  “Not quite. And over about three feet, another mirror: Juanita Lopez. Summer ’24.”

  “Don’t ring no bell.”

  “Next mirror: Carla Moore. Christmas, 1925.”

  “Hey,” said Henry. “Silent film but a sighted friend spoke her to me one matinee. Carla Moore! She was something!”

  I guided the flashlight.

  “Eleanor Twelvetrees. April ’26,” I read.

  “Helen Twelvetrees was in The Cat and the Canary.”

  “This might’ve been her sister, but so many names were fake, you never know. Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford. Lily Chauchoin was re-born as Claudette Colbert. Gladys Smith: Carole Lombard. Cary Grant was Archibald Leach.”

  “You could run a quiz show.” Henry extended his fingers. “What’s this?”

  “Jennifer Long: ’29.”

  “Didn’t she die?”

  “Disappeared, about the time Sister Aimee sank in the sea and arose, reborn, on the Hallelujah shore.”

  “How many more names?”

  “As many as there are mirrors.”

  Henry tasted one finger. “Yum! It’s been a long time but—lipstick. What color?”

  “Tangee Orange. Summer Heat Coty. Lanvier Cherry.”

  “Why do you figure these ladies wrote their names and dates?”

  “Because, Henry, it wasn’t a lot of ladies. One woman signed the names, all different.”

  “One woman who wasn’t a lady? Hold my cane while I think.”

  “You don’t have a cane, Henry.”

  “Funny how your hand feels things not there. You want me to guess?”

  I nodded even though Henry couldn’t see; I knew he’d feel the rush of my bobbing head. I wanted him to say it, needed to hear him speak that name. Henry smiled at the mirrors, and his smile beamed one hundredfold.

  “Constance.”

  His fingers touched the glass.

  “The Rattigan,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Again, Henry leaned to brush a reddish signature and then touch it to his lips.

  He moved to the next glass, repeated the gesture, and let his tongue figure.

  “Different flavors,” he noted.

  “Like different women?”

  “It all comes back.” His eyes squeezed tight. “Lord, Lord. Lots of women passed through my hands, through my heart, came and went unseen; all those flavors. Why do I feel stopped up?”

  “Because I feel the same way.”

  “Crumley says when you turn on the faucets, stand back. You’re a good boy.”

  “I’m no boy.”

  “You sound like you’re fourteen, when your voice changed and you tried to grow a mustache.”

  He moved and touched, then looked with his sightless eyes at the ancient residue on his fingers.

  “All these have to do with Constance?”

  “A hunch.”

  “You got a powerful stomach; I know from having your stuff read to me. My mama once said a powerful midsection is better than two brains. Most folks use their brains too much when they should be listening to that thing under their ribs. The gang—ganglion? My mama never called it that. House spider, she said. When she met some damn-fool politician, she always felt right above her stomach. If the spider was twitching, she’d smile: yes. But if the spider tightened into a ball, she shut her eyes: no. That’s you.

  “My mama read you. She said you don’t write them weary stories (she meant eerie) with gray matter. You pull the spider legs under your ribs. My mama said, ‘That boy will never be sick, never get poisoned by people, he knows how to upchuck, teasing that balled-up spider to let go.’ She said, ‘He don’t stay up nights in a bad life, getting old while he’s young. He’d make a great doctor, cut right to the pain and toss it out.’”

  “Your mama said all that?” I blushed.

  “Woman who got twelve kids, buried six, raised the rest. One bad husband, one good. She got fine ideas which side to use in bed so you untie, let your gut free.”

  “I wish I had met her.”

  “She’s still around.” Henry put his palm on his chest.

  Henry surveyed the unseen mirrors, pulled his black glasses from his pocket, wiped and put them on.

  “That’s better. Rattigan, these names, was she crazy wild? Was she ever honest-to-God sane?”

  “Offshore. I heard her swimming way out with the seals, barking, a free soul.”

  “Maybe she should have stayed out there.”

  “Herman Melville,” I muttered.

  “Say again?”

  “Took me years to finish Moby-Dick. Melville should have stayed at sea with Jack, his loving friend. Land? When he lived there, it tore his soul from his heart. Onshore, he aged thirty years, in a customs shed, half-dead.”

  “Poor son of a bitch,” whispered Henry.

  “Poor son of a bitch,” I echoed quietly.

  “And Rattigan? You think she should’ve stayed offshore, not in her fancy beach place?”

  “It was big, bright, white, and lovely, but a tomb full of ghosts, like those films upstairs forty feet tall, fifty years wide, like these mirrors here, and one woman hating them all for unknown reasons.”

  “Poor son of a bitch,” murmured Henry.

  “Poor bitch,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Let’s see some more,” said Henry. “Switch on the lights so I won’t need my cane.”

  “Can you feel if lights are on or off ?”

  “Silly child. Read me the names!”

  I took his arm and we moved along the mirrors as I read the names.

  “The dates under the names,” Henry commanded. “They getting closer to now?”

  1935. 1937. 1939. 1950. 1955.

  And with names, names, names to go with them, all different.

  “One too many,” said Henry. “We done?”

  “One last mirror and date. October thirty-first. Last year.”

  “How come everything happens to you on Halloween?”

  “Fate and providence love wimps like me.”

  “You say the date, but …” Henry touched the cold glass. “No name?”

  “None.”

  “She going to come add a name? Going to show up making noises just a dog hears, and no light down here. She—”

  “Shut up, Henry.” I stared along the mirrors in the cellar night where shadow-phantoms ran.

  “Son.” Henry took my arm. “Let’s git.”

  “One last thing.” I took a dozen steps and stopped.

  “Don’t tell me.” Henry inhaled. “You’re fresh out of floor.”

  I looked down at a round manhole. The darkness sank deep with no end.

  “Sounds empty.” Henry inhaled. “A freshwater storm drain!”

  “Beneath the back of the theater, yes.”

  “Damn!”

  For suddenly a flood of water gushed below, a clean tide smelling of green hills and cool air.

  “It rained a few hours ago. Takes an hour for the runoff to get here. Most of the year the storm drain’s dry. Now it’ll run a foot deep, all the way to the ocean.”

  I bent to feel the inside of the hole. Rungs.

  Henry guessed. “You’re not climbing down?”

  “It’s dark and cold and a long way to the sea, and if you’re careless, drowning.”

  Henry sniffed.

  “You figure she came up this way to check those names?”

  “Or came in through the theater and climbed down.”

  “Hey! More water!”

  A gust of wind, very cold, sighed up out of the hole.

  “Jesus Christ!” I yelled.

  “What?”

  I stared. “I saw somethi
ng!”

  “If you didn’t, I did!” The flashlight beam arced crazily around the mirrored room as Henry grabbed my elbow and lurched away from the hole.

  “We going the right way?”

  “Christ,” I said. “I hope so!”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Our taxi dropped us at the curb behind Rattigan’s big white Arabian fortress.

  “Lordy,” said Henry, and added, “That meter ran overtime. From now on, I’m driving.”

  Crumley was not out front by the shoreline but farther up by the pool with half a dozen full martini glasses, two already empty. He gazed at these fondly and explained.

  “I’m ready now for your numbskull routines. I am fortified. Hello, Henry. Henry, aren’t you sorry you left New Orleans for this can-o’-worms factory?”

  “One of those drinks smells like vodka, right? That will make me not sorry.”

  I handed a glass to Henry and took one for myself in haste while Crumley scowled at my silence.

  “Okay, spill it,” he said.

  I told him about Grauman’s and the basement dressing-room mirrors. “Plus,” I said, “I been making lists.”

  “Hold it. You’ve sobered me up,” said Crumley. “Let me kill another.” He lifted a glass in mock salute. “Okay, read your lists.”

  “The grocery boy on Mount Lowe. The neighbors of Queen Califia in Bunker Hill. Father Rattigan’s secretary. The film projectionist on high in Grauman’s Chinese.”

  Henry cut in. “That gent in Grauman’s …?”

  I described Rustler, stashed among stacks of old film with the pictures on the walls of all the sad women with all the lost names.

  Henry mused. “Hey now. Did you make a list of those ladies in the pictures up on high?”

  I read off my pad: “Mabel. Helen. Marilee. Annabel. Hazel. Betty Lou. Clara. Pollyanna …”

  Crumley sat up straight.

  “You got a list of those names on the cellar mirrors?”

  I shook my head. “It was dark down there.”

  “Easy as pie.” Henry tapped his head. “Hazel. Annabel. Grace. Pollyanna. Helen. Marilee. Betty Lou. Detect the similarities?”

  As the names rolled from Henry’s mouth, I ticked them off my penciled list. A perfect match.

  At which point there was a lightning strike. The lights failed. We could hear the surf roar in to salt Rattigan’s beach as pale moonlight silvered the shore. Thunder clamored. It gave me time to think and say, “Rattigan’s got a complete run of Academy annuals with all the pictures, ages, roles. Her competition is in every one. It ties in with all those upstairs pictures, downstairs mirrors, right?”

  Thunder echoed, the lights blinked back on.

  We went inside and got out the Academy books.

  “Look for the mirror names,” Henry advised.

  “I know, I know,” Crumley growled.

  In half an hour we had thirty years of Academy annuals paper-clipped.

  “Ethel, Carlotta, Suzanne, Clara, Helen,” I read.

  “Constance can’t hate them all.”

  “Chances are,” said Henry. “What else she got in her bookshelves?”

  An hour later we found some actors’ reference albums, crammed with pictures, going way back. One with a legend up front giving the name J. Wallington Bradford. I read, “A.k.a. Tallullah Two, a.k.a. Swanson, Gloria in Excelsius, a.k.a. Funny Face.”

  A quiet bell sounded in the back of my head.

  I opened another album and read: “Alberto Quickly. Fast flimflammery. Plays all parts Great Expectations. Acts A Christmas Carol, Christmas Carol’s Scrooge, Marley, Three Christmases, Fezziwig. Saint Joan, unburned. Alberto Quickly. Quick Change. Born: 1895. At liberty.” The quiet bell sounded again.

  “Hold on,” I said. I felt myself murmuring. “Pictures, mirrors, and now here’s a guy, Bradford, who is all women. And then here’s another guy, Quickly, who is all men, every man.” The bell faded. “Did Constance know them?”

  Like a sleepwalker I moved to pick up Constance’s Book of the Dead.

  There it was.

  Bradford on one page, near the beginning of the book.

  Quickly toward the end.

  “But no red circles around the names. So? Are they alive or dead?”

  “Why not go see,” said Henry.

  Lightning struck. The lights failed again.

  In the dark, Henry said, “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Crumley dropped us by the old apartment house and ran.

  “Now,” said Henry, “what are we doing here?”

  Inside, I glanced up the three-story stairwell. “Searching for Marlene Dietrich alive and well.”

  Before I even knocked on the door, I caught the perfume through the paneling. I sneezed and knocked.

  “Dear God,” a voice said. “I haven’t a thing to wear.”

  The door opened and a billowing butterfly kimono stood there with a Victorian relic inside, squirming to make it fit. It stopped squirming and tape-measured my shoes, my knee bones, my shoulders, and finally eye to eye.

  “J. Wallington Bradford?” I cleared my throat. “Mr. Bradford?”

  “Who’s asking?” the creature in the doorway wondered. “Jesus. Come in. Come in. And who’s this other thing?”

  “I’m the boy’s Seeing Eye.” Henry probed the air. “That a chair? Think I’ll sit. Sure smells strong in here. Nothing personal.”

  The kimono let loose a blizzard of confetti in its lungs and waved us in with a grand sweep of its sleeve. “I hope it isn’t business that brings you here. Sit, while Mama pours gin. Big or small?”

  Before I could speak he had filled a big glass with clear Bombay blue crystal liquor. I sipped.

  “That’s a good boy,” said Bradford. “You staying five minutes or the night? My God, he’s blushing. Is this about Rattigan?”

  “Rattigan!” I cried. “How’d you know?”

  “She was here and gone. Every few years Rattigan vanishes. It’s how she divorces a new husband, an old lover, God, or her astrologer. ¿Quién sabe?”

  I nodded, stunned.

  “She came years ago, asking how I did it. All those people, she said. Constance, I said, how many cat lives have you had? A thousand? Don’t ask which flue I slid up, which bed I ran under!”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Mother Earth knows all. Constance invented Freud, tossed in Jung and Darwin. Did you know she bedded all six studio heads? It was a bet she took at the Brown Derby from Harry Cohn. ‘I’ll harvest Jack Warner and his brothers till their ears fly off,’ she said.

  “‘All in the same year?’ Cohn yelled.

  “‘Year, hell,’ said Constance. ‘In one week, with Sunday off !’

  “ ‘I bet a hundred you can’t!’ said Cohn.

  “ ‘Make it a thousand and you’re on,’ said Constance.

  “Harry Cohn glared. ‘What will you put up as collateral?’

  “ ‘Me,’ said Rattigan.

  “ ‘Shake!’ cried Cohn.

  “She shook all over. ‘Hold these!’ She flung her pants in Cohn’s lap and fled.”

  Breathless, J. W. Bradford raved on: “Did you know that once I was Judy Garland. Then Joan Crawford, then Bette Davis. I was Bankhead in Lifeboat. A real nightwalker, late sleeper, bed buster. You need help finding Rattigan? I can list her discards. Some fell in my lap. You want to say something?”

  “Is there a real you in there, somewhere?” I said.

  “God, I hope not. How terrible to find me in bed with just me! Rattigan. You tried her beach house? Artie Shaw stayed there after Caruso. She got him when she was thirteen. Drove him up the La Scala wall. When she topped off Lawrence Tibbett, he sang soprano. They had a squad car of paramedics by her joint, 1936, when she mouth-to-mouth breathed Thalberg into Forest Lawn. You okay?”

  “I just got hit by a ten-ton safe.”

  “Take more gin. Tallulah says so.”

  “You’ll hel
p us find Constance?”

  “No one else can. I loaned her my whole wardrobe a million years back. Gave her my makeup-box rejects, taught her perfumes, how to surprise her eyebrows, lift her ears, shorten her upper lip, widen her smile, flatten or bulge her bosom, walk taller than tall, or fall short. I was a mirror she posed in front of, watching me stare, blink, pretend remorse, alert, despair, delight, sing in a gilded cage, power-dive into pajamas, breast-stroke out. She trotted in a high school pony, swarmed out a nest of ballerinas. By the time she left, she was someone else. That was ten thousand vaudevilles ago. And all so she could compete with other actresses for other roles in films, or maybe steal their men.

  “Okay, doll,” J. W. Bradford said as he scribbled on a pad. “Here’s more names of those who loved Constance. Nine producers, ten directors, forty-five at-liberty actors, and a partridge in a pear tree.”

  “Did she never hold still?”

  “Ever see those seals in Rattigan’s surf ? Slick as oil, quicker than quicksilver, hit the bed like lightning. Number one in the L.A. Marathon long before there was one. Could have been board chairman at three studios, but wound up as Vampira, Madame Defarge, and Dolley Madison. There!”

  “Thanks.” I scanned a list that would have filled the Bastille twice over.

  “Now if you’ll forgive, Mata Hari must change!”

  Zip! He flourished his kimono.

  Zip! I grabbed Henry’s arm and we flew down the stairs and out onto the street.

  “Hey!” someone cried. “Wait!”

  I turned and looked up. Jean Harlow-Dietrich-Colbert leaned over the top rail, smiling wildly, waiting for Von Stroheim to shoot her close-up.

  “There’s someone else like me, even crazier. Quickly!”

  “Alberto Quickly!” I called. “He’s alive?”

  “He does one nightclub a week, then hospital rehabs. When they sew him up he repeats his farewell tour. Damn fool, in his nineties, said he found Constance (a lie!) on Route 66 when he was, my God, forty, fifty. Driving across country, he picked up this tomboy with suspicious breasts. Made her a star while his act faded. Runs a théâtre intime in his parlor. Charges folks on Friday nights to see Caesar stabbed, Antony on his sword, Cleopatra bitten.” A piece of paper sailed down. “There! And something else!”