“It’s been steady on and quiet for months.”
“Then that must be it. The profits! I mean. Everything going along nice and easy and then something happens, doesn’t look like much, scares everybody. Someone thinks, my God, one man on a wall, there goes the neighborhood! Got to be something under the carpet somewhere, something buried—” Crumley laughed. “Buried is right. Arbuthnot? You think someone dug up some old really dirty scandal that nobody ever even heard of, and is threatening the studio, not very subtly, with releasing the dirt?”
“What kind of scandal, twenty years old, could make a studio think it was going to be destroyed if it was revealed?”
“If we wade in the sewer long enough we’ll know. Trouble is, sewer-hopping was never my hobby. Was Arbuthnot, alive, clean?”
“Compared to other studio heads? Sure. He was single and had girlfriends, but you expect that of any bachelor, and they were all nice Santa Barbara horsewomen, Town and Country types, handsome and bright, showered twice a day. No dirt.”
Crumley sighed again, as if someone had dealt him the wrong cards and he was ready to fold his hand and fade. “What about that car crash Arbuthnot was in? Was it an accident?”
“I saw the news photos.”
“Photos, hell!” Crumley looked out at his homemade jungle and checked the shadows. “What if the accident wasn’t an accident? What if it was, well, manslaughter. What if everyone was dead drunk and then dead?”
“They had just come from a big liquor bash at the studio. That much got in the papers.”
“Try this,” mused Crumley. “Studio bigwig, rich as Croesus, with all-time grosses for Maximus, out of his mind with hooch, playing chicken with the other car, driven by Sloane, ricochets off him and everyone hits the telephone pole. That’s not the kind of news you want front-paged. Stock markets dive. Investors vanish. Films die. The silver-haired boy falls off his pedestal, et cetera, et cetera, so there’s a coverup. Now, late in time, someone who was there, or uncovered the facts this year, is shaking down the studio, threatening to tell more than photos and skid-marks. Or what if—?”
“What if ?”
“It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t horse-around drunkenness that slammed them to hell. What if someone did it to them on purpose?”
“Murder!?” I said.
“Why not? Studio heads that tall, that big, that wide, make lots of enemies. All the yes-men around them eventually think rat crap and malice. Who was next in line for power at Maximus that year?”
“Manny Leiber? But he wouldn’t kill a fly. He’s all hot air!”
“Give him the benefit of one fly and one hot air balloon. He’s the studio head now, right? Well! A couple of slashed tires, some loosened bolts, and bang! the whole studio falls in your lap for a lifetime!”
“That all sounds logical.”
“But if we could find the guy that did it, he’d prove it for us. Okay, buster, what next?”
“I suppose we check the old local newspapers from twenty years ago to see what’s missing. And if you could kind of prowl around the studio. Unobtrusively, that is.”
“With these flat feet? I think I know the studio gate guard. Worked at Metro years ago. He’d let me in and zip his lip. What else?”
I gave him a list. The carpenters’ shop. The graveyard wall. And the Green Town house where Roy and I had planned to work, and where Roy might be now.
“Roy’s still there, waiting to steal back his beasts. And, Crum, if what you say is true, night chicken rides, manslaughter, murder, we got to blow Roy out of there now. If the studio people go in Stage 13 tonight and find the box in which Roy hid that papier-mâché body after he stole it, what won’t they do to him?!”
Crumley grunted. “You’re asking me to not only get Roy rehired but help him stay alive, right?”
“Don’t say that!”
“Why not? You’re all over the ball field, playing pitcher and running to bat flies and fumble balls. How in hell do I catch Roy? Wander around the sets with a butterfly net and some cat food! Your studio friends know Roy, I don’t. They can stomp him long before I get out of the bull pen. Give me just one fact to start with!”
“The Beast. If we found out who he is, we might find why Roy was fired for making that clay bust.”
“Yeah, yeah. What else? About the Beast—”
“We saw him go into the graveyard. Roy followed him, but wouldn’t tell me what he saw, what the Beast was up to. Maybe, maybe it was the Beast put that papier-mâché duplicate of Arbuthnot up on the graveyard wall—and sent notes to blackmail people!”
“Now you’re cooking!” Crumley rubbed his bald head with both hands, rapidly. “Identify the Beast, ask where he borrowed the ladder and how he made the look-alike Arbuthnot papier-mâché corpse! Well! well!” Crumley beamed.
He ran to the kitchen for more beer.
We drank and he gazed at me with paternal affection. “I was just thinking … how great it is to have you home.”
I said, “Hell, I haven’t even asked you about your novel—”
“Downwind from Death?”
“That’s not the title I gave you!”
“Your title was too good. I’m giving it back. Downwind from Death will be published next week.”
I leaped to grab Crumley’s hands.
“Crumb!! Oh, God! You did it! You got some champagne?!”
We both peered in his icebox.
“If you churn beer and gin in a Waring blender, is that champagne?”
“Why not try?”
We tried.
24
And the phone rang.
“It’s for you,” said Crumley.
“Thank God!” I grabbed the phone. “Roy!”
Roy said, “I don’t want to live. Oh, God, this is terrible. Get over here before I go mad. Stage 13!”
And he was gone.
“Crumley!” I said.
Crumley led me out to his car.
We rode across town. I couldn’t get my teeth unclenched to speak. I held so hard to my knees that the circulation ran dead.
At the studio gate I told Crumley, “Don’t wait. I’ll call in an hour and let you know …”
I walked away and bumped into the gate. I found a phone booth near Stage 13 and ordered a taxi to wait outside Stage 9, a good one hundred yards away. Then I walked through the doors of Stage 13.
I stepped into darkness and chaos.
25
I saw ten dozen things which were a devastation to my soul.
Nearby, the masks, skulls, jackstraw legbones, floating ribs, skull faces of the Phantom had been uprooted and hurled across the stage in frenzies.
Further over, a war, an annihilation, had just fallen in its own dusts.
Roy’s spider towns and beetle cities were trodden into the earth. His beasts had been eviscerated, decapitated, blasted, and buried in their own plastic flesh.
I advanced through ruins, scattered as if a night bombing had rained utter destruction upon the miniature roofs, turrets and Lilliputian figurines. Rome had been smashed by a gargantuan Attila. The great library at Alexandria was not burned; its tiny leaflet books, like the wings of hummingbirds, lay in drifts across the dunes. Paris smoldered. London was disemboweled. A giant Napoleon had stomped Moscow flat forever. In sum, five years’ work, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, had been wasted in, what? Five minutes!
Roy! I thought, you must never see this!
But he had.
As I advanced across the lost battlefields and strewn villages I saw a shadow on the far wall.
It was a shadow from the motion picture The Phantom of the Opera when I was five. In that film some ballerinas, backstage, twirling, had frozen, stared, shrieked, and fled. For there, hung like a sandbag from the flies, they saw the body of the night watchman, slowly swaying, high in the stage flies. The memory of that film, that scene, the ballerinas, the dead man hung high in shadows, had never left me. And now, at the far north side of this s
ound stage, an object drifted on a long spider line. It shed an immense, twenty-foot darkness on the empty wall, like a scene from that old and frightening picture.
Oh, no, I whispered. It can’t be!
It was.
I imagined Roy’s arrival, his shock, his outcry, his smothering despair, then his rage, with new despairs to drown and win after his call to me. Then his wild search for rope, twine, wire, and at last: downslung and drifting peace. He could not live without his wondrous midges and mites, his sports, his dears. He was too old to rebuild it all.
“Roy,” I whispered, “that can’t be you! You always wanted to live.”
But Roy’s body turned slowly, shadowed and high. My Beasts are slain, it said.
They were never alive!
Then, whispered Roy, I was never alive.
“Roy,” I said, “would you leave me alone in the world!?”
Maybe.
“But you wouldn’t let someone hang you!?”
Perhaps.
And if so, how come you’re still here? How come they haven’t cut you down?
Which means?
You’re freshly dead. You haven’t been found. I’m the first to see!
I ached to touch his foot, his leg, to be sure it was Roy! Thoughts of the papier-mâché man in the coffin shot through my head.
I inched my hand out to touch … but then …
Over by his desk was the sculpture platform on which had been hidden his last and greatest work, the Beast, the Monster from the midnight Derby, the Creature who went in churches beyond the wall and across a street.
Someone had taken a ballpeen hammer and struck it a dozen blows. The face, the head, the skull, were banged and smashed until only a shapeless mound remained.
Jesus God, I whispered.
Was this the final crime that made Roy self-destroy?
Or had the destroyer, waiting in the shadows, struck Roy unaware amidst his ruined towns, and hanged him on the air?
I trembled. I stopped.
For I heard the stage door spring wide.
I pulled off my shoes and ran, quietly, to hide.
26
It was the surgeon-medico-physician, the high-noon abortionist, the needle-pushing defrocked high-priest doctor.
Doc Phillips glided into the light on the far side of the stage, glancing about, seeing the ruin, then finding the hanged body above, he nodded, as if this death were an everyday calamity. He stepped forward, kicking the ruined cities as if they were mere garbage and irrelevant trash.
Seeing this, I coughed up a curse. I clapped my hand to my mouth and jerked back in shadow.
I peered through a crack in the set wall.
The doctor had frozen. Like a buck in a forest clearing, he peered around through his steel-rimmed glasses, using his nose as well as his eyes. His ears seemed to twitch on the sides of his shaven skull. He shook his head. He shuffled, shoving Paris, knocking London, arriving to reach and examine the terrible hanged thing in midair. …
A scalpel flashed in his hand. He seized a prop trunk, opened it, shoved it under the hanged body, grabbed a chair, stepped up on it, and slashed the rope above Roy’s neck.
There was a dreadful crash when Roy hit the trunk bottom.
I coughed up my grief. I froze, sure that this time he had heard and would come, a cold steel smile in his hand. I gripped my breath tight.
Leaping down, the doc bent to examine the body.
The outside door banged wide. Feet and voices echoed.
The cleanup men had arrived, and whether this was their regular time, or if he had called them to work, I did not know.
Doc slammed the lid, hard.
I bit my knuckles and jammed my fingers in my mouth to muffle my terrible bursts of despair.
The trunk lock snapped. The doctor gestured.
I shrank back as the team of workmen crossed the set with brooms and shovels to thrust and toss Athens’ stones, Alhambra’s walls, Alexandria’s libraries and Bombay’s Krishna shrines into a dumpster.
It took twenty minutes to clean and cart off the lifework of Roy Holdstrom, taking with it, on a creaking trolley, the trunk in which, crumpled and invisible, lay my friend’s body.
When the door slammed a last time, I gave an agonized shout of grief against the night, death, the damned doctor, the vanishing men. I ran with fists to strike the air and stopped, blind with tears. Only when I had stood shaking and weeping for a long while did I stop and see an incredible thing.
There was a stack of interfaced doorway facades leaned against the north wall of the stage, like the sills and doors through which Roy and I had plunged the day before.
In the center of the first doorway was a small familiar box. It looked as if it had been left by accident. I knew it was there as a gift.
Roy!
I lunged forward to stand, looking down, and touch the box. Whisper—tap.
Whatever lay inside rustled.
Are you in there, body from the ladder on the wall in the rain?
Whisper-tap-murmur.
Damn it! I thought, won’t I ever be rid of you!?
I grabbed the box and ran.
I reached the outer door and threw up.
Eyes shut, I wiped my mouth, then opened the door slowly. Far down the alley the workmen turned a corner toward the carpenters’ shop and the big iron incinerator.
Doc Phillips, behind them, gave silent directions.
I shivered. If I had arrived five minutes later, I might have come at the very moment he had found Roy’s body and the destroyed cities of the world. My body would have gone into the trunk with Roy’s!
My taxi was waiting behind Stage 9.
Nearby was a phone booth. I stumbled in, dropped a coin, called the police. A voice came on saying, “Yes? Hello, yes, hello, yes!”
I swayed drunkenly in the booth, looking at the receiver as if it were a dead snake.
What could I say? That a sound stage was cleared and empty? That an incinerator was probably burning right now, long before patrol cars and sirens could help?
And then what? Me, alone here with no armor, no weapons, no proof ?
Me fired and maybe dead and over that wall to the tombs on permanent loan?
No!
I gave a shriek. Someone battered me with a hammer until my skull was red clay, torn like the flesh of the Beast. Staggering to get out, I was yanked to strangle on my own fright in a coffin locked, no matter how I banged the glass.
The phone-booth door flew wide.
“You were pushing the wrong way!” my taxi driver said.
I gave some sort of crazy laugh and let him lead me out.
“You forgot something.”
He brought me the box, which had fallen in the booth.
Whisper-rustle-tap.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Him.”
On the way out of the studio, I lay down on the back seat. When we got to the first outside street corner, the driver said, “Which way do I turn?”
“Left.” I bit the back of my wrist. The driver was staring into his rear-view mirror.
“Jesus,” he said, “you look awful. You gonna be sick?”
I shook my head.
“Someone die?” he guessed.
“Dead, yes.”
“Here we are. Western Avenue. I go north?”
“South.” Toward Roy’s apartment way out at Fifty-fourth. What then? Once inside, mightn’t I smell the good doctor’s cologne hanging in the hall like an unseen curtain? And his workmen, down a dark corridor, carrying things, waiting to lug me away like a piece of wrecked furniture?
I shivered and rode, wondering if and when I would ever grow up. I listened to my insides and heard:
The sound of breaking glass.
My parents had died a long time back and their deaths seemed easy.
But Roy? I could never have imagined a downpour of fright like this, so much grief you could drown in it.
Now I feared to go back to the studio. Th
e crazed architecture of all those countries nailed together, now falling to crush me. I imagined every southern plantation, each Illinois attic crammed with maniac relatives and smashed mirrors, every closet hung with tenterhooked friends.
The midnight gift, the toy box with the papier-mâché flesh and death-maddened face, lay on the taxicab floor.
Rustle-tap-whisper.
A thunderclap shook my chest.
“No, driver!” I said. “Turn here. To the ocean. To the sea.”
When Crumley opened his front door, he examined my face and wandered off to the telephone.
“Make that five days’ sick leave,” he said.
He came back with a full tumbler of vodka and found me sitting in the garden taking deep breaths of good salt air, trying to see the stars, but there was too much fog moving in over the land. He looked at the box on my lap, took my hand, placed the vodka in it and guided it to my mouth.
“Drink that,” he said, quietly, “then we’ll put you to bed. Talk in the morning. What’s that?”
“Hide it,” I said. “If someone knew it was here, we might both disappear.”
“But what is it?”
“Death, I guess.”
Crumley took the cardboard box. It stirred and rustled and whispered.
Crumley lifted the lid off the carton and peered down in. Some strange papier-mâché thing stared back up at him.
Crumley said, “So that’s the former head of Maximus Studios, is it?”
“Yes,” I said.
Crumley studied the face for another moment and nodded quietly. “That’s death, all right.”
He shut the lid. The weight inside the box shifted and whispered something like “sleep” in its rustling.
No! I thought, don’t make me!
27
We talked in the morning.
28
At noon, Crumley dropped me in front of Roy’s apartment house out at Western and Fifty-fourth Street. He examined my face carefully.
“What’s your name?”
“I refuse to identify myself.”
“You want me to wait?”
“You go on. The sooner you walk around the studio and check things out, the better. We shouldn’t be seen together, anyway. You got my list of checkpoints and the map?”