“That thing we talked about? The rain? And the man on the ladder?”
“Yes!?”
“I saw him,” said J. C.
“My God, J. C.! Then what did he look like? What—”
“Shh!” he added, forefinger to his serene lips.
And returned to Calvary.
Constance drove me back to my house just after dawn.
There didn’t seem to be any strange cars with spies waiting in them on my street.
Constance made a big thing of wallowing all over me at my front door.
“Constance! The neighbors!”
“Neighbors, my patootie!” She kissed me so hard my watch stopped. “Bet your wife doesn’t kiss like that!”
“I’d have been dead six months ago!”
“Hold yourself where it matters, as I slam the door!”
I grabbed and held. She slammed and drove off. Almost instantly I was filled with loneliness. It was like Christmas going away forever.
In my bed I thought: J. C., damn you! Why couldn’t you have said more?
And then: Clarence! Wait for me!
I’m coming back!
One last try!
45
At noon I went to Beachwood Avenue.
Clarence had not waited.
I knew that when I forced the half-open door of his bungalow court apartment. Snowstorms of torn paper, crushed books, and slashed pictures lay against it, much like the Stage 13 massacre, where Roy’s dinosaurs lay kicked and stomped to ruin.
“Clarence?”
I shoved the door wider.
It was a geologist’s nightmare.
There was a foot-thick layer of letters, notes signed by Robert Taylor and Bessie Love and Ann Harding way back in 1935 or earlier. That was the top stratum.
Further down, spread in a glossy blanket, lay thousands of photographs that Clarence had snapped of Al Jolson, John Garfield, Lowell Sherman, and Madam Schumann-Heink. Ten thousand faces stared up at me. Most were dead.
Under more layers were autograph books, film histories, posters from ten dozen flickers, starting with Bronco Billy Anderson and Chaplin and fidgeting up through those years when the clutch of lilies known as the Gish Sisters paled across the screen to lachrymose the immigrant heart. And at last, beneath Kong, The Lost World, Laugh Clown Laugh, and under all the spider kings, talcumed toe dancers, and lost cities I saw:
A shoe.
The shoe belonged to a foot. The foot, twisted, belonged to an ankle. The ankle led to a leg. And so on up along a body until I saw a face of final hysteria. Clarence, hurled and filed between one hundred thousand calligraphies, drowned in floods of ancient publicity and illustrated passions that might have crushed and drowned him, had he not already been dead.
By his look, he might have died from cardiac arrest, the simplest recognition of death. His eyes were sprung flash-photo wide, his mouth in a frozen gape: What are you doing to my tie, my throat, my heart?! Who are you?
I had read somewhere that, dying, the victim’s retina photographs its killer. If that retina could be stripped and drowned in emulsion, the murderer’s face would rise from darkness.
Clarence’s wild eyes begged to be so stripped. His destroyer’s face was frozen in each.
I stood in the flood of trash, staring. Too much! Every file had been tumbled, hundreds of pictures chewed. Posters torn from walls, bookcases exploded. Clarence’s pockets had been yanked out. No robber had ever brutalized like this.
Clarence, who feared to be killed in traffic, and so waited at street signals until the traffic was absolutely clear so he could run his true pals, his pet albums of faces, safely across.
Clarence.
I turned round-about, wildly hoping to find a single clue to save for Crumley.
The drawers to Clarence’s desk had been jerked free and their contents eviscerated.
A few pictures remained on the walls. My eyes roved and fixed on one.
Jesus Christ on the Calvary backlot.
It was signed,“To Clarence,PEACE from the one and only J. C.”
I knocked it from its frame, stuffed it in my pocket.
I turned to run, my heart pounding, when I saw a last thing. I grabbed it.
A Brown Derby matchbox.
Anything else?
Me, said Clarence, all cold. Help me.
Oh, Clarence, I thought, if only I could!
My heart banged. Afraid someone might hear, I fell out the door.
I ran from the apartment house.
Don’t! I stopped.
If they see you run, you did it! Walk slow, stand still. Be sick. I tried, but only dry heaves and old memory came up.
An explosion. 1929.
Near my house a man hurled from his wrecked car, shrieking: “I don’t want to die!”
And me on the front porch, with my aunt, crushing my head to her bosom so I couldn’t hear.
Or when I was fifteen. A car smashing a telephone pole and people exploding against walls, fire hydrants, a jigsaw of torn bodies and strewn flesh …
Or …
The ruin of a burned car, with a charred figure sitting grotesquely upright behind the wheel, quiet inside his ruined charcoal mask, shriveled-fig hands melted to the steering wheel …
Or …
Suddenly I was smothered with books and photographs and signed cards.
I walked blindly into a wall and groped along an empty street, thanking God for emptiness, until I found what I thought was a phone booth and took two minutes searching my pockets for a nickel that was there all the time. I shoved it in the slot, dialed.
It was while I was dialing Crumley, that the men with the brooms showed up. There were two studio vans and an old beat-up Lincoln that swept by on their way to Beachwood Avenue. They turned at the corner leading around to Clarence’s apartment. Even the sight of them made me squeeze-sink accordion-wise in the booth. The man in the beat-up Lincoln could have been Doc Phillips, but I was so busy hiding, sinking to my knees, I couldn’t tell.
“Let me guess,” said Crumley’s voice on the line. “Someone really die?”
“How’d you know?”
“Calm down. When I come there will it be too late, all the evidence destroyed? Where are you?” I told him. “There’s an Irish pub down the way. Go sit. I don’t want you out in the open if things are as bad as you say. You okay?”
“I’m dying.”
“Don’t! Without you, how would I fill my days?”
Half an hour later Crumley found me half inside the Irish pub front door and regarded me with that look of deep despair and paternal affection that came and went across his face like clouds on a summer landscape.
“Well,” he grouched, “where’s the body?”
At the bungalow court we found the door to Clarence’s bungalow ajar, as if someone had left it unlocked on purpose.
We pushed.
And stood in the middle of Clarence’s apartment.
But it was not empty, eviscerated the way Roy’s place had been.
All the books were in their cases, the floor clean, no torn letters. Even the framed pictures, most of them, were back on their walls.
“Okay,” sighed Crumley. “Where’s all the junk you said?”
“Wait.”
I opened one drawer of a four-layer file. There were photos, battered and torn, crammed in place.
I opened six files to show Crumley I hadn’t been dreaming.
The stomped-on letters had been stuffed in each one.
There was only one thing missing.
Clarence.
Crumley eyed me.
“Don’t!” I said. “He lay right where you’re standing.”
Crumley stepped over the invisible body. He went through the other files, as I had done, to see the torn cards, the hammered and bludgeoned photos, stashed out of sight. He let out a great heavy-anvil sigh and shook his head.
“Someday,” he said, “you’ll blunder into something that makes sense. There
’s no body, so what can I do? How do we know he hasn’t gone on vacation?”
“He’ll never come back.”
“Who says? You want to go to the nearest station and file a complaint? They’ll come look at the torn stuff in the files, shrug, say one less nut off the old Hollywood tree, tell the landlord and—”
“The landlord?” said a voice behind us.
An old man stood in the door.
“Where’s Clarence?” he said.
I talked fast. I raved, maundered, and described all of 1934 and 1935 and me rambling on my roller skates, pursued by a maniac cane-wielding W. C. Fields and kissed on the cheek by Jean Harlow in front of the Vendome restaurant. With the kiss, the ball bearings popped from my skates. I limped home, blind to traffic, deaf to my school chums.
“All right, all right, I get the picture!” The old man glared around the room. “You don’t look like sneaks. But Clarence lives as if a mob of photo snatchers might rape him. So—”
Crumley handed over his card. The old man blinked at it and gripped his false teeth with his gums.
“I don’t want no trouble here!” he whined.
“Don’t worry. Clarence called us, afraid. So we came.”
Crumley glanced around.
“Have Sopwith call me. Okay?”
The old man squinted at the card. “Venice police? When will they clean ’em up?”
“What?”
“The canals! Garbage. The canals!”
Crumley steered me out.
“I’ll look into it.”
“Into what?” the old man wondered.
“The canals,” said Crumley. “Garbage.”
“Oh, yeah,” said the old man.
And we were gone.
46
We stood on the sidewalk watching the apartment house as if it might suddenly roll down a runway, like a ship sliding into the sea.
Crumley didn’t look at me. “Same old lopsided relationship. You’re a wreck because you saw a body. I’m one because I didn’t. Crud. I suppose we could wait around for Clarence to come back?”
“Dead?”
“You want to file a missing-person report? What you got to go on?”
“Two things. Someone stomped Roy’s miniature animals and destroyed his clay sculpture. Someone else cleaned the mess. Someone scared or strangled Clarence to death. Someone else cleaned up. So two groups, or two individuals: The one who destroys; the one who brings the trunks, brooms, and vacuum cleaners. Right now all I can figure is the Beast came over the wall, kicked Roy’s stuff to death on his own, and ran off, leaving things to be found, cleaned away, or hid. Same thing here. The Beast climbed down off Notre Dame—”
“Climbed down?”
“I saw him face to face.”
For the first time, Crumley looked a little pale.
“You’re going to get yourself killed, god damn it. Stay off high places. For that matter, should we be standing here in broad daylight, gabbing? What if those mop-up guys come back?”
“Right.” I began to move.
“You want a lift?”
“It’s only a block to the studio.”
“I’m heading downtown to the newspaper morgue. There must be something there on Arbuthnot and 1934 we don’t know. You want me to search for Clarence, on the way?”
“Oh, Crum,” I said, turning. “You know and I know, by now they’ve burned him to ashes and burned the ashes. And how do we get in to shake down the clinkers in the backlot incinerator? I’m on my way to the Garden of Gethsemane.”
“Is that safe?”
“Safer than Calvary.”
“Stay there. Call me.”
“You’ll hear me, across town,” I said, “without a phone.”
47
But first, I stopped at Calvary.
The three crosses were empty.
“J. C.,” I whispered, touching his picture folded in my pocket, and realized suddenly that a rich presence had been following me for some time.
I looked around as Manny’s mob of fog, his gray-shadow Chinese-funeral Rolls-Royce, crept up behind me. I heard the back door suck its rubber gums as the soundless door exhaled wide, letting out a cool burst of refrigerated air. Not much larger than an Eskimo Pie, Manny Leiber peered out from his elegant icebox. “Hey, you,” he said.
It was a hot day. I leaned into the refrigerated Rolls-Royce cubby and refreshed my face while I improved my mind.
“I got news for you.” I could see Manny’s breath on the artificial winter air. “We’re shutting down the studio for two days. General cleanup. Repainting. Crash job.”
“How can you do that? The expense—”
“Everyone will be paid full time. Should’ve been done years ago. So we shut down—”
For what? I thought. To get everyone off the lot. Because they know or suspect Roy is still alive, and someone has told them to find and kill him?
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” I said.
I had found that insult was the best answer. Nobody suspected you of anything if you, in turn, were dumb enough to insult.
“Whose idea was this dumb idea?” I said.
“Whatta you mean?” cried Manny, pulling back into his refrigerator. His breath steamed in jets of frost on the air. “Mine!”
“You’re not that dumb,” I pursued. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that. You care about money too much. Someone had to order you to do that. Someone above you?”
“There’s no one above me!” But his eyes slid, while his mouth equivocated.
“You take full credit for all this, that’ll cost maybe half a million in one week?”
“Well,” Manny flinched.
“It’s gotta be New York.” I let him off. “Those dwarfs on the telephone from Manhattan. Crazed monkeys. You’re only two days away from finishing Caesar and Christ. What if J. C. goes on another binge while you’re repainting the stages—?”
“That charcoal pit was his last scene. We’re writing him out of our Bible. You are. And another thing, as soon as the studio reopens, you go back on The Dead Ride Fast.”
His words breathed out to chill my face. The chill spread down my back.
“Can’t be done without Roy Holdstrom.” I decided to play it even more blunt and naïve. “And Roy’s dead.”
“What?” Manny leaned forward, fought for control, then squinted at me. “Why do you say that?”
“He committed suicide,” I said.
Manny was even more suspicious. I could imagine him hearing the report from Doc Phillips: Roy hanged on Stage 13, cut down, carted off, burned.
I continued as naïvely as possible: “You still got all his animals locked in Stage 13?”
“Er, yes,” Manny lied.
“Roy can’t live without his Beasts. And I went to his apartment the other day. It was empty. Someone had stolen all of Roy’s other cameras and miniatures. Roy couldn’t live without those, either. And he wouldn’t just run off. Not without telling me, after twenty years of friendship. So, hell, Roy’s dead.”
Manny examined my face to see if he could believe it. I worked up my saddest expression.
“Find him,” said Manny, at last, not blinking.
“I just said—”
“Find him,” said Manny, “or you’re out on your ass, and you’ll never work at any other studio the rest of your life. The stupid jerk’s not dead. He was seen in the studio yesterday, maybe hanging around to break in Stage 13 and get his damned monsters. Tell him all is forgiven. He comes back with a raise in salary. It’s time we admit we were wrong and we need him. Find him, and your salary is raised, too. Okay?”
“Does that mean Roy gets to use that face, that head, he made out of clay?”
Manny’s color level sank. “Christ, no! There’ll be a new search. We’ll run ads.”
“I don’t think Roy will come back if he can’t create his Beast.”
“He’ll come, if he knows what’s good for him.”
And g
et himself killed an hour after he punches the time clock? I thought.
“No,” I said. “He’s really dead—forever.”
I hammered all the nails into Roy’s coffin, hoping Manny would believe, and not close down the studio to finish the search. A dumb idea. But then insane people are always dumb.
“Find him,” said Manny and lay back, frosting the air with his silence.
I shut the icebox door. The Rolls floated off on its own whispering exhaust, like a cold smile vanishing.
Shivering, I made the Grand Tour. I crossed Green Town to New York City to Egyptian Sphinx to Roman Forum. Only flies buzzed on my grandparents’ front-door screen. Only dust blew between the Sphinx’s paws.
I stood by the great rock that was rolled in front of Christ’s tomb.
I went to the rock to hide my face.
“Roy,” I whispered.
The rock trembled at my touch.
And the rock cried out, No hiding place.
God, Roy, I thought. They need you, at last, for ten seconds anyway before they stomp you into paste.
The rock was silent. A dust-devil squirreled through a nearby Nevada false-front town, and laid itself out like a burning cat to sleep by an old horse trough.
A voice shouted across the sky: “Wrong place! Here!”
I glanced a hundred yards over to another hill, which blotted out the city skyline, a gentle rolling sward of fake grass that stood green through every season.
There, the wind blowing his white robes, was a man in a beard.
“J. C.!” I stumbled up the hill, gasping.
“How do you like this?” J. C. pulled me the last few yards, reaching out with a grave, sad smile. “The Mount of the Sermon. Want to hear?”
“There’s no time, J. C.”
“How come all those other people two thousand years back listened and were quiet?”
“They didn’t have watches, J. C.”
“No.” He studied the sky. “Only the sun moving slow and all the days in the world to say the needful things.”
I nodded. Clarence’s name was stuck in my throat.
“Sit down, son.” There was a big boulder nearby and J. C. sat and I crouched like a shepherd at his feet. Looking down at me, almost gently, he said, “I haven’t had a drink today.”
“Great!”