He talked to the wall. Now he turned to gaze at me, stricken with alarms and growing hate. “The whole thing lasted, what? an hour? Yet it has haunted me these years.”
“Emily Sloane, mad—?”
“A woman led her away. An actress. I’ve forgotten the name. Emily Sloane did not know she was taken. She died the next week or the week after, I heard.”
“No,” I said. “There was a triple burial three days later. Arbuthnot alone. The Sloanes together, or so the story goes.”
The priest regrouped his tale. “No matter. She died.”
“It matters a great deal.” I leaned forward. “Where did she die?”
“All I know is she did not go to the morgue across the street.”
“To a hospital, then?”
“You’ve got all I know.”
“Not all, father, but some—”
I walked to the rectory window to peer out at the cobbled courtyard and the drive leading in.
“If I ever came back, would you tell the same story?”
“I should not have told you anything! I have breached my confessional vows!”
“No, none of what you’ve said was told in private. It simply happened. You saw it. And now it’s done you good to confess at last to me.”
“Go.” The priest sighed, poured another drink, slugged it back. It did nothing to color his cheeks. He only sagged more awry in his flesh. “I am very tired.”
I opened the door of the rectory and looked along the hall toward the altar bright with jewels and silver and gold.
“How is it such a small church has such rich interiors?” I said. “The baptistry alone could finance a cardinal and elect a pope.”
“Once,” Father Kelly gazed into his empty glass, “I might have gladly consigned you to the fires of hell.”
The glass fell from his fingers. He did not move to pick up the pieces. “Goodbye,” I said.
I stepped out into sunlight.
Across two empty lots and a third, heading north from the back of the church, there were weeds and long grass and wild clover and late sunflowers nodding in a warm wind. Just beyond was a two-story white frame house with the name in unlit neon above: HOLLYHOCK HOUSE SANITARIUM.
I saw two ghosts on the path through the weeds. One woman leading another, going away.
“An actress,” Father Kelly had said. “I forget the name.”
The weeds blew down the path with a dry whisper.
One ghost woman came back on the path alone, weeping.
“Constance—?” I called out quietly.
62
I walked around down Gower and over to look in through the studio gate.
Hitler in his underground bunker in the last days of the Third Reich, I thought.
Rome burning and Nero in search of more torches.
Marcus Aurelius in his bath, slitting his wrists, letting his life drain.
Just because someone, somewhere, was yelling orders, hiring painters with too much paint, men with immense vacuum cleaners to snuff the suspicious dust.
Only one gate of the whole studio was open, with three guards standing alert to let the painters and cleaners in and out, checking the faces.
At which point Stanislau Groc roared up inside the gate in his bright red British Morgan, gunned the engine, and cried: “Out!”
“No, sir,” said the guard quietly. “Orders from upstairs. Nobody leaves the studio for the next two hours.”
“But I’m a citizen of the city of Los Angeles! not this damn duchy!”
“Does that mean,” I said through the grille, “if I come in, I can’t go out?”
The guard touched his cap visor and said my name. “You can come in, and out. Orders.”
“Strange,” I said. “Why me?”
“Dammit!” Groc started to get out of his car.
I stepped through the small door in the grille and opened the side door of Groc’s Morgan.
“Can you drop me at Maggie’s editing room? By the time you’re back they’ll probably let you out.”
“No. We’re trapped,” said Groc. “This ship’s been sinking all week, and no lifeboats. Run, before you drown, too!”
“Now, now,” said the guard quietly. “No paranoia.”
“Listen to him!” Groc’s face was chalk-pale. “The great studioguard psychiatrist! You, get in. It’s your last ride!”
I hesitated and looked down into a face that was a crosshatch of emotions. All the parts of Groc’s usually brave and arrogant front were melting. It was like a test pattern on a TV screen, blurred, clearing up, then dissolving. I climbed in and slammed the door, which banged the car off on a maniac path.
“Hey, what’s the rush!?”
We gunned by the sound stages. Each one was wide open and airing. The exteriors of at least six of them were being repainted. Old sets were being wrecked and carried out into the sunlight.
“On any other day, lovely!” Groc shouted above his engine. “I would have loved this. Chaos is my meat. Stockmarkets crashed? Ferryboats capsized? Superb! I went back to Dresden in 1946 just to see the destroyed buildings and shell-shocked people.”
“You didn’t?!”
“Wouldn’t you like to have seen? Or the fires in London in 1940. Every time mankind behaves abominably, I know happiness!”
“Don’t good things make you happy? Artistic people, creative men and women?”
“No, no.” Groc sped on. “That depresses. A lull between stupidities. Just because there are a few naïve fools mucking up the landscape with their cut roses and still-life arts only shows in greater relief the troglodytes, midget worms and sidewinding vipers that oil the underground machineries and run the world to ruin. I decided years ago, since the continents are vast sludge works, I would buy the best-size boots and wallow in it like a babe. But this is ridiculous, us locked inside a stupid factory. I want to laugh at, not be destroyed by, it. Hold on!” We swerved past Calvary.
I almost yelled.
For Calvary was gone.
Beyond, the incinerator lifted great plumes of black smoke.
“That must be the three crosses,” I said.
“Good!” Groc snorted. “I wonder—will J. C. sleep at the Midnight Mission tonight?”
I swiveled my head to look at him.
“You know J. C. well?”
“The muscatel Messiah? I made him! As I made others’ eyebrows and bosoms, why not Christ’s hands! So I pared the extra flesh to make his fingers seem delicate: the hands of a Saviour. Why not? Is not religion a joke? People think they are saved. We know they’re not. But the crown-of-thorns touch, the stigmata!” Groc shut his eyes as he almost drove into a telephone pole, swerved and stopped.
“I guessed you had done that,” I said, at last.
“If you act Christ, be Him! I told J. C. I will make you spike marks to show at Renaissance exhibitions! I will sew you the stigmata of Masaccio, da Vinci, Michelangelo! From the Pietà’s marble flesh! And, as you’ve seen, on special nights—”
“—the stigmata bleed.”
I knocked the car door wide. “I think I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“No, no,” Groc apologized, laughing shrilly. “I need you. What an irony! To get me out the front gate, later. Go talk to Botwin, then we run like hell.”
I held the door half open, undecided. Groc seemed in such a joyful panic, hilarious to the point of hysteria, I could only shut the door. Groc drove on.
“Ask, ask,” said Groc.
“Okay,” I tried. “What about all those faces you made beautiful?”
Groc pedaled the gas.
“They’ll last forever, I told them, and the fools believed. Anyway, I am retiring, if I can get out the front gate. I have bought passage on a round-the-world cruise tomorrow. After thirty years my laughs have turned to snake spit. Manny Leiber? Will die any day. Doc? Did you know? He’s gone.”
“Where?”
“Who knows?” But Groc’s eyes slid north toward the stud
io graveyard wall. “Excommunicated?”
We drove. Groc nodded ahead. “Now Maggie Botwin I like. She’s a perfectionist surgeon, like me.”
“She doesn’t sound like you.”
“If she ever did, she’d die. And you? Well, disillusionment takes time. You’ll be seventy before you find you’ve crossed minefields yelling to an idiot troop, ‘This way!’ Your films will be forgotten.”
“No,” I said.
Groc glanced over at my set chin and stubborn upper lip.
“No,” he admitted. “You have the look of the true sainted fool. Not your films.”
We rounded another corner and I nodded to the carpenters, the cleaners, and painters: “Who ordered all this work?”
“Manny, of course.”
“Who ordered Manny? Who really gives orders here? Someone behind a mirror? Someone inside a wall?”
Groc braked the car swiftly and looked ahead. I could see the stitch marks around his ears, nice and clear.
“It can’t be answered.”
“No?” I said. “I look around, what do I see? A studio, in the midst of production on eight films. One a huge one, our Jesus epic, with two more days of shooting to go. And suddenly, on a whim, someone says: Slam the doors. And the crazed painting and cleaning happens. It’s madness to shut a studio with a budget that runs at least ninety to a hundred thousand dollars a day. What gives?”
“What?” said Groc, quietly.
“Well, I see Doc and he’s a jellyfish, poisonous, but no spine. I look at Manny and his behind is just right for highchairs. You? There’s a mask behind your mask and another under that. None of you have the dynamite kegs or the electric pump plunger to knock the whole damn studio down. Yet down it goes. I see a studio as big as a white whale. Harpoons fly. So there’s got to be a real maniac captain.”
“Tell me, then,” Groc said, “who is Ahab?”
“A dead man standing on a ladder in the graveyard, looking over, giving orders. And you all run,” I said.
Groc blinked three slow iguana-lizard blinks of his great dark eyes.
“Not me,” he said, smiling.
“No? Why not?”
“Because, you damned fool.” Groc beamed, looking at the sky. “Think! There are only two geniuses smart enough to have manufactured that dead man of yours on that ladder in the rain to look over the wall and stop people’s hearts!” And here Groc was taken with a paroxysm of laughter that almost killed. “Who could model a face like that!”
“Roy Holdstrom!”
“Yes! And?!”
“Lenin’s—” I stammered—“Lenin’s makeup man?”
Stanislau Groc turned the full light of his smile on me.
“Stanislau Groc,” I said, numbly. “. . . You.”
He bowed his head modestly.
You! I thought. Not the Beast hiding in the tombs, climbing the ladder to position the scarecrow Arbuthnot and stop the studio dead, no! But Groc, the man who laughs, the tiny Conrad Veidt with the eternal grin sewn to his face!
“Why?” I said.
“Why?” Groc smirked. “My God, to stir things up! Jesus, it’s been boring here for years! Doc sick with needles. Manny ripping himself in two. Myself, not getting enough laughs on this ship of fools. So raise the dead! But you spoiled it, found the body but told no one. I hoped you’d run yelling through the streets. Instead, the next day, you clammed up. I had to make a few anonymous calls to get the studio into the graveyard. Then, riots! Pandemonium.”
“Did you send the other note to coax me and Roy to the Brown Derby to see the Beast?”
“I did.”
“And all,” I said, numbly, “for a joke?”
“Not quite. The studio, as you have noticed, sits astride that ravenous crack known as the San Andreas fault, ripe for quakes. I felt them months ago. So I propped the ladder and raised the dead. And raised my pay so you might say.”
“Blackmail,” Crumley whispered in the back of my mind.
Groc squirmed with joy at his own telling: “Scare Manny, Doc, J. C., everyone, including the Beast!”
“The Beast? You wanted to scare him?!”
“Why not? The mob! The bunch! Get them all to pay, as long as they didn’t find out I was behind it. Run a riot, take the payola, head for the exit!”
“Which means, good God,” I said, “you must have known everything about Arbuthnot’s past, his death. Was he poisoned? Was that it?”
“Ah,” said Groc, “theories, speculations.”
“How many people know you’ve bought that round-the-world ticket?”
“Only you, poor sad lovely doomed boy. But I think someone’s guessed. Why else is the front gate shut and me trapped?”
“Yes,” I said. “They just threw Christ’s tomb out with the lumber. They need a body to go with it.”
“Me,” Groc said, suddenly bleak.
A studio police car had pulled up beside us.
A guard leaned out.
“Manny Leiber wants you.”
Groc sank down, his flesh into his blood, his blood into his soul, his soul into nothingness.
“This is it,” whispered Groc.
I thought of Manny’s office and the mirror behind the desk and the catacombs beyond the mirror.
“Break and run,” I said.
“Fool,” said Groc. “How far would I get?” Groc patted my hand with trembling fingers. “You’re a jerk, but a good jerk. No, from here on, anyone seen with me goes down the maelstrom when they pull the chain. Here.”
He shoved his briefcase over on the seat, opened it and shut it again. I saw a flash of bundled one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Grab,” said Groc. “It’s no use to me now. Hide it fast. Highon-the-hog money for the rest of your life.”
“No, thanks.”
He gave it another shove against my leg. I pulled away, as if a dagger of ice had stabbed my knee.
“Jerk,” he said. “But a good jerk.”
I got out.
The police car, creeping ahead, its motor puttering, honked its horn quietly, once. Groc stared at it and then at me, looking at my ears, my eyelids, my chin.
“Your skin won’t need work for, oh, thirty years, give or take a year.”
His mouth was thick with phlegm. He swiveled his eyes, grasped the wheel with snatching, grappling fingers, and drove away.
The police car turned the corner, his car followed, a small funeral cortège moving toward the back studio wall.
63
I climbed the stairs to Maggie Botwin’s palace of reptiles. So called because of all the dropped scenes, the sidewinder film coils in the bin or slithering across the floor.
The small room was empty. The old ghosts had fled. The snakes had gone to ground somewhere else.
I stood in the middle of empty shelves, looking around until I found a note pasted to the top of her silent Moviola.
DEAR GENIUS. TRIED CALLING YOU DURING THE PAST TWO HOURS. WE HAVE QUIT THE BATTLE OF JERICHO AND FLED. WE WILL FIGHT THE FINAL BATTLE AT MY HILLSIDE BUNKER. CALL. COME! SIEG HEIL, FRITZ AND JACQUELINE THE RIPPER.
I folded the note to stash in my diary and read in my old age. I walked down the steps and out of the studio.
There were no storm troopers in sight.
64
Walking along the shore, I told Crumley about the priest, and the path through the weeds and the two women walking there a long time ago.
We found Constance Rattigan on the beach. It was the first time I had ever seen her lying on the sand. Always before she was in her pool or in the sea. Now she lay between, as if she had no strength to go in the water or back to her house. She was so beached, stranded, and pale it hurt me to see.
We crouched down on the sand beside her and waited for her to feel us there, eyes shut.
“You’ve been lying,” Crumley said.
Her eyeballs revolved under her lids. “Which lie do you mean?”
“About your running away in the midst of that midnight p
arty, twenty years ago. You know you stayed until the very end.”
“What did I do?” She turned her head away. We could not see if she was looking out at the gray sea, where an early-afternoon fog was rolling in to spoil the hour.
“They brought you to the scene of the accident. A friend of yours needed help.”
“I never had any friends.”
“Come on, Constance,” said Crumley, “I’ve got the facts. I’ve been collecting facts. Newspapers say there were three funerals on the same day. Father Kelly, over at that church near where the accident really happened, says Emily Sloane died after the funerals. What if I got a court order to break into the Sloanes’ tomb? Would there be one body there or two? One, I think, and Emily gone where? And who took her? You? On whose orders?”
Constance Rattigan’s body trembled. I could not tell if it was some old grief suddenly surfaced in shock, or just the mist now moving around us.
“For a dumb dick, you’re pretty smart,” she said.
“No, just some days I fall in a nest of eggs and don’t break one. Father Kelly told our screenwriter friend here that Emily’s mind was gone. So she had to be led. Were you in charge?”
“God help me,” whispered Constance Rattigan. A wave fell on the shore. A thicker fog reached the surf-line. “Yes …”
Crumley nodded quietly and said: “There must have been a big, a terrible, God knows, a huge coverup, on the spot. Did someone stuff the poorbox? I mean, did the studio promise to, hell, I don’t know, redecorate the altar, finance widows and orphans forever? Hand the priest an impossible fortune every week if he forgot that you walked Emily Sloane out of there?”
“That—” murmured Constance, eyes wide, sitting up now, searching the horizon—“was part of it.”
“And more money in the poorbox, and more and more, if the priest said the accident happened not in front of his church but down the street maybe a hundred yards, so he didn’t see Arbuthnot ram the other car, kill his enemy, or his enemy’s wife gone mad at their deaths. Yes?”