A Graveyard for Lunatics

  “Take it easy!” said Crumley.

  “We’re not being followed,” said Henry. “Listen! the blind man says. Where we going?”

  “To my grandparents’.”

  “Well, now that sounds nice,” said Henry.

  Hustling along, we whispered:

  “Good God, does anyone in the studio know about that passage?”

  “If so, they never said.”

  “Lord, think. If nobody knew, and the Beast came every night or every day, and listened behind the wall, after a while he’d know everything. All the deals, the ins and outs, all the stockmarket junk, all the women. Save up the data long enough and you’re ready to cash in. Shake the Guy at them, get the money, run.”

  “The Guy?”

  “The Guy Fawkes dummy, the fireworks mannequin, the Guy they toss on the bonfire every Guy Fawkes Day in England, November 5th. Like our Halloween, but religious politics. Fawkes almost blew up Parliament. Caught, he was hanged. We got something like it here. The Beast plans to blow up Maximus. Not literally, but rip it apart with suspicion. Scare everyone. Shake a dummy at them. Maybe he’s been shaking them down for years. And nobody the wiser. He’s an inside trader using secret information.”

  “Whoa!” said Crumley. “Too neat. I don’t like it. You think no one knows the Beast is behind the wall, the mirror?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then how come the studio, or one part of it, your boss, Manny, has a conniption fit when he sees Roy’s clay model of the Beast?”

  “Well—”

  “Does Manny know the Beast’s there and fear him? Did the Beast come into the studio at night, see Roy’s work, and destroy it in a rage? And now Manny’s afraid Roy will blackmail him because Roy knows the Beast exists and no one else does? What, what, what? Answer, quick!”

  “God’s sake, Crumley, hush!”

  “Hush! What kind of rough talk is that?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “I can hear the cogs turn. Which is it? Is everyone ignorant as to who hides behind the mirror listening? and so they fear the unknown? Or do they know and are twice as afraid because the Beast has gathered so much dirt over the years he can go where he damn well pleases, collect his money, run back under the wall? They don’t dare cross him. He probably has letters some lawyer will mail the day something happens to him. Witness Manny’s panics, hanging out his underwear ten times a day? Well? Which is it? Or do you have a third version?”

  “Don’t make me nervous. I’ll go into a funk.”

  “Hell, kid, that’s the last thing I’d want to do,” said Crumley, with a twist of lemon in his mouth. “Sorry to shove you into a king-size funk, but I hate keeping time with your quarterhorse half-ass deductions. I’ve just run through a tunnel chased by a criminal beehive you kicked over. Have we stirred up a nest of Mafia or just a single maniac acrobat? Promises, promises! Where’s Roy? where’s Clarence, where’s the Beast? Give me one, just one, body! Well?”

  “Wait.” I stopped, turned, walked away.

  “Where you going?” groused Crumley.

  Crumley followed me up the small hill.

  “Where in hell are we?”

  He peered around through the night.

  “Calvary.”

  “What’s that up there?”

  “Three crosses. You were complaining about bodies?”

  “So?”

  “I have this terrible feeling.”

  I put my hand out to touch the base of the cross. It came away sticky and smelling of something as raw as life.

  Crumley did the same. He sniffed his fingertips and nodded, sensing what it was.

  We looked up along the cross at the sky.

  After a while our eyes got used to the darkness.

  “There’s no body there,” said Crumley.

  “Yes, but—”

  “It figures,” said Crumley and stalked off toward Green Town.

  “J. C.?” I whispered. “J. C.”

  Crumley called from down the hill. “Don’t just stand there!”

  “I’m not just standing here!”

  I counted to ten, slowly, wiped my eyes with digging fists, blew my nose, and fell downhill.

  I led Henry and Crumley up the path to my grandparents’ house.

  “I smell geraniums and lilacs.” Henry lifted his face.

  “Yes.”

  “And cut grass and furniture polish and plenty of cats.”

  “The studio needs mousers. Steps, here, Henry, eight up.”

  We stood on the porch, breathing hard.

  “My God.” I looked out at Jerusalem’s hills beyond Green Town and the Sea of Galilee, beyond Brooklyn. “All along I should have seen. The Beast didn’t go to the graveyard, he was entering the studio! What a setup. Using a tunnel no one suspects to spy on his blackmail victims. See how much he had scared them with that body on the wall, grab the money, scare ’em again and pick up more!”

  “If,” said Crumley, “that’s what he was doing.”

  I took a deep trembling breath and at last let it out.

  “There’s one more body I haven’t delivered to you.”

  “I’d rather not hear,” said Crumley.

  “Arbuthnot’s.”

  “Crud, that’s right!”

  “Somebody stole it,” I said. “A long time ago.”

  “No, sirree,” said blind Henry. “It was never there. That was a clean place, that icehouse tomb.”

  “So where’s Arbuthnot’s body been all these years?” asked Crumley.

  “You’re the detective. Detect.”

  “Okay,” said Crumley, “how’s this? Halloween booze party. Someone poisons the hooch. Gives it to Arbuthnot at the last second as he leaves. Arbuthnot, driving, dies at the wheel, smashes the other car off the road. There’s a coverup. Autopsy shows his body glows with enough poison to pile-drive an elephant. Before the funeral, instead of burying the evidence, they burn it. Arbuthnot, so much smoke, goes up the chimney. So his empty sarcophagus waits in the tomb, where blind Henry here tells all.”

  “I did do that, didn’t I?” Henry agreed.

  “The Beast, knowing the tomb is vacant and the reason why maybe, uses it as a base, hoists the Arbuthnot look-alike on the ladder, and watches the scalded ants run in a fright picnic over the wall. Okay?”

  “That still doesn’t find us Roy, J. C., Clarence, or the Beast,” I said.

  “Lord deliver me from this guy!” Crumley pleaded with the sky.

  Crumley was delivered.

  There was a fearful racket in the studio alleys, some backfires, honks, and a yell.

  “That’s Constance Rattigan,” observed Henry.

  Constance parked in front of the old house and cut the motor.

  “Even when she turns off the ignition,” said Henry, “I can still hear her motor running.”

  We met her at the front door.

  “Constance!” I said. “How did you get past the guard?”

  “Easy.” She laughed. “He was an old-timer. I reminded him I’d once attacked him in the men’s gym. While he was blushing, I roared in! Well, damn, if it isn’t the world’s greatest blind man!”

  “You still working at that lighthouse, directing ships?” asked Henry.

  “Give me a hug.”

  “You sure feel soft.”

  “And Elmo Crumley, you old s.o.b.!”

  “She’s never wrong,” said Crumley, as she broke all his ribs.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Constance. “Henry? Lead!”

  “I’m gone!”said Henry.

  On the way out of the studio I murmured, “Calvary.”

  Constance slowed as we passed the ancient hill.

  There was complete darkness. No moon. No stars. One of those nights when the fog comes in early from the sea and covers all of Los Angeles, at a height of about five hundred feet. The airplanes are muffled and the airports closed.

  I gazed steadily up the little hill hoping to find Christ in
a drunken farewell-tour Ascension.

  “J. C.!” I whispered.

  But the clouds shifted now. I could see the crosses were empty.

  Three gone, I thought. Clarence drowned in paper, Doc Phillips hauled up in Notre Dame’s midnight at noon, leaving one shoe. And now … ?

  “See anything?” asked Crumley.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  When I roll the Rock aside. If I have the guts.

  There was a waiting silence from everyone in the car.

  “Out,” suggested Crumley.

  I said quietly, “Out.”

  At the front gate Constance shouted something obscene at the guard, who reeled back.

  We went toward the sea and Crumley’s.

  56

  We stopped at my house. As I ran to fetch my 8-millimeter projector, the phone rang.

  After the twelfth ring I snatched it up.

  “Well?” said Peg. “How come you stood there for twelve rings with your hand on the phone?”

  “God, women’s intuition.”

  “What’s up? Who disappeared? Who’s sleeping in Mama Bear’s bed? You haven’t called. If I were there, I’d throw you out of the house. It’s hard to do long distance but, get out!”

  “Okay.”

  That shot her through the chest.

  “Hold on,” she said, alarmed.

  “You said: Get out!”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Crumley’s waiting outside.”

  “Crumley!” she shrieked, “By the bowels of Christ! Crumley!?”

  “He’ll protect me, Peg.”

  “Against your panics? Can he mouth-to-mouth breathe those? Can he make sure you eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner? Lock you out of the refrigerator when you get too chunky? Does he make you change your underwear!?”

  “Peg!”

  And we both laughed just a little.

  “You really going out the door? Mama will be home on Flight sixty-seven, Pan Am, Friday. Be there! with all the murders solved, bodies buried, and rapacious women kicked downstairs! If you can’t make it to the airport, just be in bed when mama slams the door. You haven’t said I love you.”

  “Peg. I love you.”

  “And one last thing—in the last hour: who died? ”

  Outside at the curb, Henry, Crumley, and Constance waited.

  “My wife doesn’t want me to be seen with you,” I said.

  “Get in.” Crumley sighed.

  57

  On the way west on an empty boulevard with not even a ghost of a car in sight, we let Henry tell what had happened in, under, through the wall and out. It was somehow fine to hear our flight described by a blind man who enunciated with his head as his dark nose snuffed deep and his black fingers sketched the wind, drawing Crumley here, himself there, me below, and the Beast behind. Or something that had lain outside the tomb door like a landslide of yeast to seal our escape. Bull! But as Henry told it we turned cold and rolled up the windows. No use. There was no top to the car.

  “And that,” declared Henry, taking off his dark glasses for finale, “is why we called you, mad lady from Venice, to come save.” Constance glanced nervously in her rear-view mirror. “Hell, we’re going too slow!”

  She put the car in whiplash. Our heads obeyed.

  Crumley unlocked his front door.

  “Okay. Spread out!” he growled. “What time is it?”

  “Late,” said Henry. “Night-blooming jasmine gets outa hand round about now.”

  “Is that true?” yelled Crumley.

  “No, but it sure sounds nice.” Henry beamed at an unseen audience. “Fetch the beer.”

  Crumley handed the beers around.

  “There’d better be gin in this,” said Constance. “Hell. There is!”

  I plugged in my projector, sprocketed Roy Holdstrom’s film, and we turned out the lights.

  “Okay?” I clicked the projector switch. “Now.”

  The film began.

  Images flickered on Crumley’s wall. There were only thirty seconds’ worth of film, and fairly jumpy, as if Roy had animated his clay bust in only a few hours instead of the many days it usually took to position a creature, take its picture, reposition it, and snap another frame, one at a time.

  “Holy Jesus,” whispered Crumley.

  We all sat stunned by what jumped across Crumley’s wall.

  It was Beauty’s friend, the thing from the Brown Derby.

  “I can’t look,” said Constance. But she looked.

  I glanced at Crumley and felt as I had felt as a child, with my brother, seated in the dark theatre as the Phantom or the Hunchback or the Bat loomed on the screen. Crumley’s face was my brother’s face, back thirty years, fascinated and horrified in one, curious and repelled, the sort of look people have when they see but do not want to see a traffic accident.

  For up on the wall, real and immediate, was the Man Beast. Every contortion of the face, every move of the eyebrows, every flare of the nostrils, every motion of the lips, was there, as perfect as the sketches that Doré made when he came home from a long night’s prowl in the cinder-dark smokestack lanes of London, with all the grotesques stashed behind his eyelids, his empty fingers itching to grab pen, ink, paper, and begin! Even as Doré had, with total recall, scribbled faces, so Roy’s inner mind had photographed the Beast to remember the slightest hair moving in the nostrils, the merest eyelash in a blink, the flexed ear, and the eternally salivating infernal mouth. And when the Beast stared out of the screen, Crumley and I pulled back. It saw us. It dared us to shriek. It was coming to kill.

  The parlor wall went dark.

  I heard a sound bubble through my lips.

  “The eyes,” I whispered.

  I fumbled in the dark, rewound the reel, restarted it.

  “Look, look, oh, look!” I cried.

  The camera image closed in on the face.

  The wild eyes were fixed in a convulsive madness.

  “That isn’t a clay bust!”

  “No?” said Crumley.

  “It’s Roy!”

  “Roy!?”

  “In makeup, pretending to be the Beast!”

  “No!”

  The face leered, the live eyes rolled.

  “Roy—”

  And the wall darkened a final time.

  Even as the Beast, met in the heights of Notre Dame, with the same eyes, pulled back away and fled ….

  “Jesus,” said Crumley at last, looking at that wall. “So that’s what’s running loose in graveyards these nights!”

  “Or Roy, running loose.”

  “That’s nuts! Why would he do that?!”

  “The Beast got him in all this trouble, got him fired, got him almost killed, what better to do than imitate him, be him, in case anyone saw. Roy Holdstrom doesn’t exist if he puts on the makeup and hides.”

  “It’s still nuts!”

  “Nuts all his life, sure,” I said. “But now? For real!”

  “What’s he gain from it?”

  “Revenge.”

  “Revenge?!”

  “Let the Beast kill the Beast,” I said.

  “No, no.” Crumley shook his head. “To hell with that. Run the film again!”

  I ran it. The images streamed up and down our faces.

  “That’s not Roy!” said Crumley. “That’s a clay bust, animated!”

  “No.” I shut off the film.

  We sat in darkness.

  Constance made strange sounds.

  “Why,” said Henry, “know what that is? Crying.”

  58

  “I’m afraid to go home,” said Constance.

  “Who said you had to?” said Crumley. “Grab a cot, any room, or the jungle compound.”

  “No,” murmured Constance. “That’s his place.”

  We all looked at the blank wall where only a lingering retinal image of the Beast faded.

  “He didn’t follow us,” said Crumley.

  “He might.” Constance blew her nose.
“I won’t be alone in some damned empty house by a damned ocean full of monsters tonight. I’m getting old. Next thing you know I’ll ask some jerk to marry me, God help him.”

  She looked out at Crumley’s jungle and the night wind stirring the palm leaves and the high grass. “He’s there.”

  “Cut it,” said Crumley. “We don’t know if we were followed through that graveyard tunnel to that office. Or who slammed the tomb door. Could’ve been the wind.”

  “It always is …. ”Constance shivered like someone coming down with a long winter’s illness. “Now what?” She sank back in her chair, shuddering, clutching her elbows.

  “Here.”

  Crumley laid out a series of photocopies of newspapers on the kitchen table. Three dozen items, large and small, from the last day in October and the first week in November 1934.

  “ARBUTHNOT, STUDIO MAGNATE, KILLED IN CAR CRASH” was the first one. “C. Peck Sloane, associate producer at Maximus studio, and his wife, Emily, killed in same accident.”

  Crumley tapped the third article. “The Sloanes were buried the same day as Arbuthnot. Services in the same church across from the graveyard. All buried in the same graveyard, over the wall.”

  “Where’d the accident happen?”

  “Three in the morning. Gower and Santa Monica!”

  “My God! The corner of the graveyard! And around the block from the studio!”

  “Awfully convenient, right?”

  “Saved travel. Die outside a mortuary, all they do is cart you in.”

  Crumley scowled at another column. “Seems there was a wild Halloween party.”

  “And Sloane and Arbuthnot were there?”

  “Doc Phillips, it says here, offered to drive them home, they’d been drinking and refused. The Doc drove his own car ahead of the other two cars, to clear the way, and went through a yellow light. Arbuthnot and Sloane followed, against the red. An unknown car almost hit them. The only car on the street at three A.M.! Arbuthnot’s and Sloane’s cars swerved, lost control, hit a telephone pole. Doc Phillips was there with his medical kit. No use. All dead. They took the bodies to the mortuary one hundred yards away.”