“A convenient fool, a useful idiot. That’s what Lenin said.”
“Lenin!? You see! At a time like this, when I’m screaming: There’s Niagara Falls! where’s your barrel!? you jump off the cliff with no parachute. Lenin!? gah! Which way to the madhouse?”
J. C. trembled as he finished the wine.
“Useful,” he swallowed, “idiot.”
“Now, listen,” he said, for it was hitting him now. “I won’t tell you again. If you stay with me, you’re squashed. If you knew what I knew, they’d bury you in ten different graves across the wall. Cut you up in neat sections, one to a plot. If your mom and dad were alive, they’d burn them. And your wife—”
I grabbed my elbows. J. C. pulled back.
“Sorry. But you are vulnerable. God, I’m still sober. I said ‘nulverable.’ Your wife is back when?”
“Soon.”
And it was like a funeral gong sounding at high noon.
Soon.
“Then hear the last book of Job. It’s over. They won’t stop until they kill everyone. Things got out of hand this week. That body on the wall you saw. It was put there to—”
“Blackmail the studio?” I quoted Crumley. “They afraid of Arbuthnot, this late in time?”
“Scared gutless! Sometimes dead folks in graves have more power than live folks above. Look at Napoleon, dead a hundred and fifty years, still alive in two hundred books! Streets and babies named for him! Lost everything, gained in losing! Hitler? Will be around ten thousand years. Mussolini? Will be hanging upside down in that gas station the rest of our lives! Even Jesus.” He studied his stigmata. “I haven’t done bad. But now I got to die again. But I’ll be screwed six ways from Sunday if I take a sweet sap like you along. Now, shut up. Is there another bottle?”
I displayed the gin.
He grabbed it. “Now help me up on my cross and get the hell out!”
“I can’t leave you here, J. C.”
“There’s nowhere else to leave me.”
He drank most of the pint.
“That’ll kill you!” I protested.
“It’s painkiller, kid. When they come to get me, I won’t even be here.”
J. C. began to climb.
I clawed at the worn wood of the cross, then hit it with my fists, my face pointed up.
“Dammit, J. C. Hell! If this is your last night on earth—are you clean!”
He slowed in his climb. “What?”
It exploded from my mouth: “When did you last confess!? When, when?”
His head jerked from south to north so his face was toward the cemetery wall and beyond.
I surprised myself: “Where? Where did you confess?”
His face was fixed rigidly, hypnotically, to the north, which made me leap to scramble up, seizing the climb pegs, groping with my feet.
“What are you doing?” J. C. shouted. “This is my place!”
“Not anymore, there, there, and here!”
I swung around behind him so he had to turn to yell: “Get down!”
“Where did you confess, J. C.?”
He was staring at me but his eyes slid north. I swiveled my gaze to fix it along the great stretch of crossbar where an arm and a wrist and a hand could be spiked.
“God, yes!” I said.
For, lined up as in a rifle’s sight was the wall, and the place on the wall where the wax and papier-mâché dummy had been hoisted in place, and, further on across a stone meadow, the facade and the waiting doors of St. Sebastian’s church!
“Yes!” I gasped. “Thanks, J. C.”
“Get down!”
“I am.” And I took my eyes away from the wall but not before I saw his face turn once again to the country of the dead and the church beyond.
I descended.
“Where you going!?” said J. C.
“Where I should’ve gone days ago—”
“You stupid jerk. Stay away from that church! It’s not safe!”
“A church not safe?” I stopped going down and looked up.
“Not that church, no! It’s across from the graveyard and, late nights, open for any damn fool who drops in!”
“He drops in there, doesn’t he?”
“He?”
“Hell.” I shivered. “Before he goes in the graveyard nights, he first goes to confession, yes?”
“Damn you!” shrieked J. C. “Now you are lost!” He shut his eyes, groaned, and began the last positioning on the dark pole in the midst of dusk and coming night. “Go ahead! You want terror? You want fright? Go hear a real confession. Hide, and when he comes in late, oh so damn late, and you listen, your soul will just shrivel, burn, and die!”
Which made me clutch the pole so hard slivers stung my palms. “J. C.? You know everything, don’t you? Tell, in Jesus Christ’s name, J. C. tell before it’s too late. You know why the body was shoved up on the wall and maybe the Beast shoved it there to scare, and just who the Beast is? Tell. Tell.”
“Poor innocent stupid son of a bitch kid. My God, son.” J. C. looked down at me. “You’re going to die and not even know all the reasons why.”
He stretched his hands out, one to the north, one to the south, to grip the crossbar as if to fly. Instead an empty bottle fell to break at my feet.
“Poor sweet son of a bitch,” he whispered to the sky.
I let go and dropped the last two feet. When I hit the ground I called up a last time, dead-bone tired: “J. C.?”
“Go to hell,” he said, sadly. “For I sure don’t know where heaven is—”
I heard cars and people nearby.
“Run,” whispered J. C. from the sky.
I could not run. I simply wandered off away.
51
I met Doc Phillips coming out of Notre Dame. He was carrying a plastic bag and had the look of one of those men who roam through public parks with nail sticks, jabbing trash to thrust in bags to be burned. He looked startled, for I had one foot up on the steps as if I were going to mass.
“Well,” he said, much too quickly and heartily. “Here’s the boy wonder who teaches Christ to walk on water and puts Judas Iscariot back in the criminal lineup!”
“Not me,” I protested. “The four apostles. I just pick up their sandals to follow.”
“What’re you doing here?” he said bluntly, his eyes flicking up and down my body, and his fingers working on the trash bag. I smelled incense, and his cologne.
I decided to go whole hog.
“Sunset. Best time to prowl. God, I love this place. I plan to own it someday. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you on. When I do, I’ll tear down the offices, make everyone really live history. Let Manny work over on Tenth Avenue, New York, there! Put Fritz in Berlin, there! Me, Green Town. Roy? if he ever returns, the nut. Build a dinosaur farm yonder. I’d run wild! Instead of forty films a year, I’d make twelve, all masterpieces! I’d make Maggie Botwin vice president of the studio, she’s that brilliant, and haul Louis B. Mayer out of retirement. And—”
I ran out of gas.
Doc Phillips stood with his mouth dropped as if I had handed him a ticking grenade.
“Anyone mind if I go in Notre Dame? I’d like to climb up and pretend I’m Quasimodo. Is it safe?”
“No!” said the Doc, much too quickly, circling me like a dog circling a fire hydrant. “Not safe. We’re doing repairs. We’re thinking of tearing the whole thing down.”
He turned and walked away. “Nuts. You’re nuts!” he cried and vanished in the cathedral entrance.
I stood watching the open door for about ten seconds, then froze.
Because from inside I heard a sort of grunt and then a groan and then a sound like cable or rope rattling against walls.
“Doc?!”
I stepped into the entrance, but could see nothing.
“Doc?”
A shadow ran up into the cathedral heights. It was like a big sandbag being hauled up in shadows.
It reminded me of Roy’s body hung swinging over on Stage
13.
“Doc!?”
He was gone.
I stared up in darkness at what looked like the bottoms of his shoes sliding higher and higher.
“Doc!”
Then, it happened.
Something struck the cathedral floor.
A single black slip-on shoe.
“Christ!” I yelled.
I pulled back to see a long shadow hauled into the cathedral sky.
“Doc?” I said.
52
“Catch!”
Crumley threw a ten-dollar bill at my taxi driver, who hooted and took off.
“Just like the movies!” Crumley said. “Guys throw money at taxis and never get change. Say thanks.”
“Thanks!”
“Christ,” Crumley examined my face. “Get inside. Get that inside.” Crumley handed me a beer.
I drank and told Crumley about the cathedral, Doc Phillips, hearing some sort of cry and a shadow sliding up in shadows. And the single black shoe falling to the dusty cathedral floor.
“I saw. But who could tell?” I finished. “The studio is nailing itself shut. I thought Doc was a villain. One of the other villains must have got him. By now, there’s no body. Poor Doc. What am I saying? I didn’t even like him!”
“Christ almighty,” said Crumley, “you bring me the New York Times crossword puzzle, when you know all I can do is the Daily News. You drag dead bodies through my house like a cat proud of its kills, no rhyme, no reason. Any lawyer would heave you out the window. Any judge would brain you with his gavel. Psychiatrists would refuse you shock privileges. You could motor down Hollywood Boulevard with all these red herrings and not get arrested for pollution.”
“Yeah,” I said, sinking into depression.
The phone rang.
Crumley handed it over.
A voice said: “They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek that scoundrel everywhere. Is he in heaven, is he in hell—”
“That damned elusive Pimpernel!” I yelled.
I let the phone drop as if a bomb had blown it away. Then I snatched it up again.
“Where are you?” I yelled.
Humm. Buzz.
Crumley clapped the phone to his ear, shook his head.
“Roy?” he said.
I nodded, staggering.
I bit one of my knuckles, trying to build a wall in my head for what was coming.
The tears arrived.
“He’s alive, he’s really alive!”
“Quiet.” Crumley shoved another drink into my hand. “Bend your head.”
I bent way over so he could massage along back of my skull. Tears dripped off my nose. “He’s alive. Thank God.”
“Why didn’t he call sooner?”
“Maybe he was afraid.” I talked blindly to the floor: “Like I said: They’re closing in, shutting the studio. Maybe he wanted me to think he was dead so they wouldn’t touch me. Maybe he knows more about the Beast than we do.”
I jerked my head.
“Eyes shut.” Crumley worked on my neck. “Mouth shut.”
“My God, he’s trapped, can’t get out. Or doesn’t want to. Hiding. We got to rescue him!”
“Rescue my ass,” said Crumley. “Which city is he in? Boston or the backlot? Uganda on the north forty? Ford’s Theatre? Get ourselves shot. There’s ninety-nine goddamn places he could hide, so we run around like sore thumbs, yodeling for him to come out, get killed? You go on that studio tour!”
“Cowardly Crum.”
“You betcha!”
“You’re breaking my neck!”
“Now you’ve caught on!”
Head down, I let him pummel and thumb all the tendons and muscles into a warm jelly. From the darkness in my skull I said, “Well?”
“Let me think, god damn it!”
Crumley squeezed my neck hard.
“No panics,” he muttered. “If Roy’s in there, we got to peel the whole damn onion layer by layer and find him in the right time and place. No shouts or the avalanche comes down on us.”
Crumley’s hands gentled behind my ears now, a proper father.
“The whole thing, it must be, has to do with the studio being terrified of Arbuthnot.”
“Arbuthnot,” mused Crumley. “I want to see his tomb. Maybe there’s something in there, some clue. You sure he’s still there?”
I sat up and stared at Crumley.
“You mean: Who’s in Grant’s tomb?”
“That old joke, yes. How do we know General Grant is still there?”
“We don’t. Robbers stole Lincoln’s body twice. Seventy years back they had actually toted it to the graveyard gate when they were caught.”
“Is that so?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe!?”shouted Crumley.“God I’m going to grow me more hair so I can tear it out! Do we go to check Arbuthnot’s tomb?”
“Well—”
“Don’t say ‘well,’ dammit!” Crumley scrubbed his bald pate furiously, glaring. “You been yelling that the man on the ladder in the rain was Arbuthnot. Maybe! Why not someone got wind of homicide and stole the body to get the proof. Why not? Maybe that car crash came not from being drunk but dying at the wheel. So whoever does the twenty-year-late autopsy has murder evidence, blackmail proof, then they make the fake body to scare the studio and rake in the cash.”
“Crum, that’s terrific.”
“No, guesswork, theory, B.S. Only one way to be sure.” Crumley glared at his watch. “Tonight. Knock on Arbuthnot’s door. See if he’s home, or someone fetched him out to get his guts read for omens and scare Caesar’s half-cracked legions to pee blood.”
I thought of the graveyard. At last I said: “No use going unless we take a real detective, to check.”
“Real detective?” Crumley stepped back.
“A seeing-eye dog.”
“Seeing-eye?” Crumley examined my face. “This dog, would he live at Temple and Figueroa? Third floor up?”
“In a midnight graveyard, no matter what you see, you need a nose. He’s got it.”
“Henry? The greatest blind man in the world?”
“Always was,” I said.
53
I had stood in front of Crumley’s door and it had opened.
I had stood on Constance Rattigan’s shore and she had stepped from the sea.
Now I edged along the carpetless floor of the old tenement where once I had lived with future dreams on my ceiling, nothing in my pockets, and empty paper waiting in my Smith-Corona portable.
I stopped in front of Henry’s door and felt my heart beating rapidly, for just below was the room where my dear Fannie had died and this was the first time I had returned since those long sad days of good friends leaving forever.
I knocked on the door.
I heard the scrape of a cane, and the muted clearing of a throat. The floor creaked.
I heard Henry’s dark brow touch the inner door panel.
“I know that knock,” he murmured.
I knocked again.
“I’ll be damned.” The door swung wide.
Henry’s blind eyes looked out on nothing.
“Let me take a deep breath.”
He inhaled. I exhaled.
“Holy Jesus,” Henry’s voice trembled like a candle flame in a soft breeze. “Spearmint gum. You!”
“Me, Henry,” I said gently.
His hands groped out. I seized both.
“Lord, son, you are welcome!” he cried.
And he grabbed and gave me a hug, then realized what he had done and pulled back. “Sorry …”
“No, Henry. Do it again.”
And he gave me a second long hug.
“Where you been, boy, oh, where you been, it’s been so long, and Henry’s here in this damn big place they going to tear down soon.”
He turned and wandered back to a chair and ordered his hands to find and examine two glasses. “This as clean as I think it is?”
I looked and nodded, th
en remembered and said, “Yep.”
“Don’t want to give you no germs, son. Let’s see. Oh, yeah.” He yanked a table drawer open and extracted a large bottle of the finest whiskey. “You drink this?”
“With you, yes.”
“That’s what friendship is all about!” He poured. He handed the glass to the empty air. Somehow my hand was there.
We waved our drinks at each other and tears spilled down his black cheeks.
“I don’t suppose you knew nigger blind men cry, did you?”
“I know now, Henry.”
“Let me see.” He leaned forward to feel my cheek. He tasted his finger. “Salt water. Damn. You’re as easy as I am.”
“Always was.”
“Don’t ever get over it, son. Where you been? Has life hurt you? How come you’re here—” He stopped. “Oh, oh! Trouble?”
“Yes and no.”
“Mostly yes? It’s all right. I didn’t figure, once you run free, you’d be back soon. I mean, this ain’t the front end of the elephant is it?”
“It’s not the back, either.”
“Near on to it.” Henry laughed. “Jesus, it’s good to hear your voice, son. I always did think you smelled good. I mean, if innocence was ever put up in a pack, it was you, chewing two sticks of spearmint at a time. You’re not sittin’. Sit. Let me tell you my worries, then you tell yours. They tore down the Venice pier, they tore up the Venice short-line train tracks, tear up everything. Next week, they rip up this tenement. Where do all the rats go? How do we abandon ship with no lifeboats?”
“You sure?”
“They got termites working overtime, below. Got dynamite squads on the roof, gophers and beavers gnawing in the walls, and a bunch of trumpeters learning Jericho, Jericho, practicing out in the alley to bring this tumbling down. Then where do we go? Not many of us left. With Fannie gone, Sam drunk to death, and Jimmy drowned in the bathtub, it was only a short haul before everyone felt put upon, nudged, you might say, by old man Death. Creeping melancholy is enough to clean out a rooming house in jig time. Let one sick mouse in, you might as well sign up for the plague.”