“It’s me,” I said. “Remember? Twenty years back. I was here. Space. Rockets. Time—?”
Charlotte gasped and flung her hand to her overbite. She leaned forward as if she might fall off the curb.
“Ma,” she cried, “why—it’s—the Crazy!”
“The Crazy.” I laughed, quietly.
A light burned in Mom’s eyes. “Why land’s sake.” She touched my elbow. “You poor thing. What’re you doing here? Still collecting—?”
“No,” I said, reluctantly. “I work there.”
“Where?”
I nodded over my shoulder.
“There?” cried Charlotte in disbelief.
“In the mailroom?” asked Ma.
“No.” My cheeks burned. “You might say … in the script department.”
“You mimeograph scripts?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ma.” Charlotte’s face burst with light. “He means writing, yes? Screenplays?!”
This last was a true revelation. All the faces around Charlotte and Ma took fire.
“Ohmigod,” cried Charlotte’s ma. “Can’t be!”
“Is,” I almost whispered. “I’m doing a film with Fritz Wong. Caesar and Christ.”
There was a long, stunned silence. Feet shifted. Mouths worked.
“Can—” said someone, “we have …”
But it was Charlotte who finished it. “Your autograph. Please? ”
“I—”
But all the hands thrust out now, with pens and white cards.
Shamefacedly, I took Charlotte’s and wrote my name. Ma squinted at it, upside down.
“Put the name of the picture you’re working on,” said Ma. “Christ and Caesar.”
“Put ‘The Crazy’ after your name,” Charlotte suggested.
I wrote “The Crazy.”
Feeling the perfect damn fool, I stood in the gutter as all the heads bent, and all the sad lost strange ones squinted to guess my identity.
To cover my embarrassment, I said: “Where’s Clarence?”
Charlotte and Ma gaped. “You remember him?”
“Who could forget Clarence, and his portfolios, and his coat,” I said, scribbling.
“He ain’t called in yet,” snapped Ma.
“Called in?” I glanced up.
“He calls on that phone across the street about this time, to see has so-and-so arrived, come out, stuff like that,” said Charlotte. “Saves time. He sleeps late, cause he’s usually out front restaurants midnights.”
“I know.” I finished the last signature, glowing with an inadmissible elation. I still could not look at my new admirers, who smiled at me as if I had just leaped Galilee in one stride.
Across the street the glass-booth phone rang.
“That’s Clarence now!” said Ma.
“Excuse me—” Charlotte started off.
“Please,” I touched her elbow. “It’s been years. Surprise?” I looked from Charlotte to her Ma and back. “Yes? ”
“Oh, all right,” grumped Ma.
“Go ahead,” said Charlotte.
The phone rang. I ran to lift the receiver.
“Clarence?” I said.
“Who’s this!? ” he cried, instantly suspicious.
I tried to explain in some detail, but wound up with the old metaphor, “the Crazy.”
That buttered no bread for Clarence. “Where’s Charlotte or Ma? I’m sick.”
Sick, I wondered, or, like Roy, suddenly afraid.
“Clarence,” I said, “where do you live?”
“Why?!”
“Give me your phone number, at least—”
“No one has that! My place would be robbed! My photos. My treasures!”
“Clarence,” I pleaded, “I was at the Brown Derby last night.” Silence.
“Clarence?” I called. “I need your help to identify someone.”
I swear I could hear his little rabbity heart race down line. I could hear his tiny albino eyes jerk in their sockets.
“Clarence,” I said, “please! Take my name and phone numbers.” I gave them. “Call or write the studio. I saw that man almost hit you last night. Why? Who … ?”
Click. Hum.
Clarence, wherever he was, was gone.
I moved across the street like a sleepwalker.
“Clarence won’t be here.”
“What d’ya mean?” accused Charlotte. “He’s always here!”
“What’d you say to him!?” Charlotte’s Ma showed me her left, her evil, eye.
“He’s sick.”
Sick, like Roy, I thought. Sick, like me.
“Does anyone know where he lives?”
They all shook their heads.
“I suppose you could follow him and see!” Charlotte stopped and laughed at herself. “I mean—”
Someone else said, “I seen him go down Beachwood, once. One of those bungalow courts—”
“Does he have a last name?”
No. Like everyone else in all the years. No last name.
“Damn,” I whispered.
“Comes to that—” Charlotte’s Ma eyed the card I had signed. “What’s your monicker?”
I spelled it for her.
“Gonna work in films,” sniffed Ma, “oughta get you a new name.”
“Just call me Crazy.” I walked away. “Charlotte. Ma.”
“Crazy,” they said. “Goodbye.”
21
Fritz was waiting for me upstairs, outside Manny Leiber’s office.
“They are in a feeding frenzy inside,” he exclaimed. “What’s wrong with you!?”
“I was talking to the gargoyles.”
“What, are they down off Notre Dame again? Get in here!”
“Why? An hour ago Roy and I were on Everest. Now he’s gone to hell and I’m sunk with you in Galilee. Explain.”
“You and your winning ways,” said Fritz. “Who knows? Manny’s mother died. Or his mistress took a few wrong balls over the plate. Constipation? High colonics? Choose one. Roy’s fired. So you and I do Our Gang comedies for six years. In!”
We stepped into Manny Leiber’s office.
Manny Leiber stood with the back of his neck watching us.
He stood in the middle of a large, all-white room, white walls, white rug, white furniture, and a huge all-white desk with nothing on it but a white telephone. A sheer blizzard of inspiration from the hand of some snow-blind artist over in Set Design.
Behind the desk was a four-by-six mirror so that if you glanced over your shoulder you could see yourself working. There was only one window in the room. It looked down on the back studio wall, not thirty feet off, and a panoramic view of the graveyard. I could not take my eyes away.
But Manny Leiber cleared his throat. With his back still turned he said: “Is he gone?”
I nodded quietly at his stiff shoulders.
Manny sensed my nod and exhaled. “His name will not be mentioned here again. He never was.”
I waited for Manny to turn and circle me, working off a passion he could not explode. His face was a mass of tics. His eyes did not move with his eyebrows or his eyebrows with his mouth or his head twisting on his neck. He looked dangerously off-balance as he paced; at any moment he might fly apart. Then he noticed Fritz Wong watching us both, and went to stand by Fritz as if to provoke him to a rage.
Fritz wisely did the one thing I noticed often when his world became too real. He removed his monocle and slipped it into his breast pocket. It was like a fine dismantling of attention, a subtle rejection. He shoved Manny in his pocket with the monocle.
Manny Leiber talked and paced. I half whispered, “Yeah, but what do we do with Meteor Crater!”
Fritz warned me with a jerk of his head: Shut up.
“So!” Manny pretended not to hear. “Our next problem, our main problem is … we have no ending for Christ and Galilee.”
“Say that again?” asked Fritz, with deadly politeness.
“No ending!” I cried. “Have you tried the Bible??
??
“We got Bibles! But our screenwriter couldn’t read the small print on a Dixie cup. I saw that Esquire story of yours. It was like Ecclesiastes.”
“Job,” I muttered.
“Shut up. What we need is—”
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and me!”
Manny Leiber snorted. “Since when do beginning writers reject the greatest job of the century? We need it yesterday, so Fritz can start shooting again. Write good and someday you’ll own all this!”
He waved.
I looked out over the graveyard. It was a bright day, but invisible rain washed the tombstones.
“God,” I whispered. “I hope not.”
That did it. Manny Leiber paled. He was back on Stage 13, in the dark, with me, Roy, and the clay Beast.
Silently, he ran to the restroom. The door slammed.
Fritz and I traded glances. Manny was sick behind the door.
“Gott,” exhaled Fritz. “I should have listened to Goering!”
Manny Leiber staggered back out a moment later, looked around as if surprised the place was still afloat, made it to the telephone, dialed, said, “Get in here!” and headed out.
I stopped him at the door.
“About Stage 13—”
Manny had his hand over his mouth as if he might be sick again. His eyes widened.
“I know you’re going to clean it out,” I said, quickly. “But I got a lot of stuff on that stage. And I want to spend the rest of the day talking with Fritz here about Galilee and Herod. Could you leave all the junk so I can come tomorrow morning and claim my stuff? Then you can clean out.”
Manny’s eyes swiveled, thinking. Then, hand over his mouth, he jerked his head once, yes, and turned to find a tall thin pale man coming in. They whispered, then with no goodbyes, Manny left. The tall pale man was I. W. W. Hope, one of the production estimators.
He looked at me, paused, and then with some embarrassment said, “It seems, ah, we have no ending for your film.”
“Have you tried the Bible?” Fritz and I said.
22
The menagerie was gone, the curb was empty in front of the studio. Charlotte, Ma, and the rest had gone on to other studios, other restaurants. There must have been three dozen of them scattered across Hollywood. One would surely know Clarence’s last name.
Fritz drove me home.
Along the way he said, “Reach in the glove compartment. That glass case. Open.”
I opened the small black case. There were six bright crystal monocles in six neat red velvet cups nested there.
“My luggage,” said Fritz. “All that I saved and took to bring to America when I got the hell out with my ravenous groin and my talent.”
“Which was huge.”
“Stop.” Fritz dutch-rubbed my skull. “Give only insults, bastard child. I show you these—” he nudged the monocles—“to prove all is not lost. All cats, and Roy, land on their feet. What else is in the glove compartment?”
I found a thick mimeographed script.
“Read that without throwing up and you’ll be a man, my son. Kipling. Go. Come back, tomorrow, two-thirty, the commissary. We talk. Then, later, we show you the rough cut of Jesus on the Dole or Father, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me. Ja? ”
I got out of his car in front of my house.
“Sieg Heil,” I said.
“That’s more like it!” Fritz drove away, leaving me to a house so empty and quiet I thought: Crumley.
Soon after sunset, I rode out to Venice on my bike.
23
I hate bikes at night, but I wanted to be sure no one followed.
Besides, I wanted time to think just what I would say to my detective friend. Something like: Help! Save Roy! Get him rehired. Solve the riddle of the Beast.
That made me almost turn back.
I could hear Crumley now, heaving great sighs as I spun my impossible tale, throwing up his hands, slugging back the beer to drown his contempt for my lack of real hammered-out Swedish-steel-spiked facts.
I parked my bike out in front of his small thornbush-hidden safari bungalow a mile from the ocean and walked up through a grove of African lilacs, along a path dusted, you felt, by okapi beasts just yesterday.
As I raised my hand to knock, the door blew open.
A fist came out of the darkness with a foaming beer can in it. I could not see the man who held it. I snatched it away. The hand vanished. I heard footsteps fade through the house.
I took three sips to get strength to enter.
The house was empty.
The garden was not.
Elmo Crumley sat under a thornbush tree, wearing his banana trader’s hat, eying the beer that he held in his sunburnt hand, and drinking silently.
There was an extension telephone on a rattan table at his elbow. Looking steadily, wearily at me from under his white hunter’s topee, Crumley dialed a number.
Someone answered. Crumley said: “One more migraine. Putting in for sick leave. See you in three days, okay? Okay.” And hung up.
“I guess,” I said, “that headache is me.”
“Any time you show up … seventy-two hours’ leave.”
He nodded. I sat. He went to stand at the rim of his own private jungle, where the elephants trumpeted and unseen flights of giant bumblebees, hummingbirds, and flamingos died long before any future ecologists declared them dead.
“Where,” said Crumley, “the hell have you been?”
“Married,” I said.
Crumley thought it over, snorted, strolled over, put his arm around my shoulder, and kissed me on the top of my head.
“Accepted!”
And laughing, he went to drag out a whole case of beer.
We sat eating hotdogs in the little rattan gazebo at the back of his garden.
“Okay, son,” he said, finally. “Your old dad has missed you. But a young man between blankets has no ears. Old Japanese proverb. I knew you’d come back someday.”
“Do you forgive me?” I said, welling over.
“Friends don’t forgive, they forget. Swab your throat out with this. Is Peg a great wife?”
“Been married a year and yet to have our first fight over money.” I blushed. “She makes most of it. But my studio salary is up—one hundred fifty a week.”
“Hell! That’s ten bucks more than I make!”
“Only for six weeks. I’ll soon be back writing for Dime Mystery.”
“And writing beauts. I’ve kept up in spite of the silence—”
“You get the Father’s Day card I sent?” I said quickly.
He ducked his head and beamed. “Yeah. Hell.” He straightened up. “But more than familial emotions brought you here, right?”
“People are dying, Crumley.”
“Not again!” he cried.
“Well, almost dying,” I said. “Or have come back from the grave not really alive, but papier-mâché dummies—”
“Hold ’er, Newt!” Crumley darted into the house and ran back with a flask of gin, which he poured into his beer as I talked faster. The sprinkler system came on in his Kenya tropical backyard, along with the cries of veldt animals and deep-jungle birds. At last I was finished with all the hours from Halloween to now. I fell silent.
Crumley let out a grievous sigh. “So Roy Holdstrom’s fired for making a clay bust. Was the Beast’s face that awful?”
“Yes!”
“Aesthetics. This old gumshoe can’t help with that!”
“You got to. Right now Roy is still in the studio, waiting for a chance to sneak all of his prehistoric models out. They’re worth thousands. But Roy’s there illegally. Can you help me figure out what in hell this all means? Help Roy get his job back?”
“Jesus,” sighed Crumley.
“Yeah,” I said. “If they catch Roy trying to move things out, lord God!”
“Damn,” said Crumley. He added more gin to his beer. “You know who that guy was in the Brown Derby?”
“No.”
“You got any notions about anyone who might know?”
“The priest at St. Sebastian’s.”
I told Crumley about the midnight confession, the voice speaking, the weeping, and the quiet response of the church father.
“No good. No way.” Crumley shook his head. “Priests don’t know or don’t give names. If I went in, asking, I’d be out on my ass in two minutes. Next.”
“The maître d’ at the Derby might. And he was recognized by someone outside the Derby that night. Someone I knew when I was a kid hanging out on my roller skates. Clarence. I’ve been asking around for his last name.”
“Keep asking. If he knows who the Beast is, we’d have something to go on. Christ, it’s dumb. Roy fired, you tossed into a new job, all from a clay bust. Overreaction. Riots. And how come all that uproar about a dummy on a ladder?”
“Exactly.”
“And I thought,” sighed Crumley, “when I saw you standing in the door, I was going to be happy that you came back into my life.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No, dammit.” He softened his voice. “Yeah, hell. But I sure wish you’d left that pile of horse manure outside.”
He squinted at the rising moon over his garden and said: “Boy oh boy … You sure got me curious.” And added: “Smells like blackmail!”
“Blackmail!?”
“Why go to all the trouble of writing notes, provoking innocents like you and Roy, propping fakes up on ladders, getting you to reproduce a Creature, if it didn’t lead somewhere? What’s the use of a panic if you don’t cash in on it. There must be more notes, more letters, right?”
“I saw none.”
“Yeah, but you were the tool, the means, to get things stirred. You didn’t spill the beans. Someone else did. I bet there’s a blackmail note out there somewhere tonight, says: ‘Two hundred thousand in unmarked fifties will buy you no more reborn corpses on walls.’ So … tell me about the studio,” Crumley said, at last.
“Maximus? Most successful studio in history. Still is. Variety headlined their profit last month. Forty million net. No other studio near.”
“Those honest figures?”
“Deduct five million, you’ve still got a studio rich as hell.”
“Any big problems, recently, ruckuses, upheavals, troubles? You know, any other people fired, films canceled?”