“Dear God,” I said. “It’s too damn neat!”
“Yeah,” mused Crumley. “A helluva responsibility for the pill-pushing dopester Doc. Coincidence, him at the scene. Him in charge of studio medicine and studio police! Him delivering the bodies to the mortuary. Him preparing the bodies for burial as funeral director? Sure? He had stock in the graveyard. Helped dig the first graves in the early twenties. Got ’em coming, going, and in between.”
Flesh really does crawl, I thought, feeling my upper arms.
“Did Doc Phillips sign the death certificates?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Crumley nodded.
Constance, who had sat frozen to one side, staring at the news clippings, spoke at last, from lips that barely moved: “Where’s that bed?”
I led her into the next room and sat her on the bed. She held my hands as if they were an open Bible and took a deep breath.
“Kid, anyone ever tell you your body smells like cornflakes and your breath like honey?”
“That was H. G. Wells. Drove women mad.”
“Too late for madness. God, your wife’s lucky, going to bed nights with health food.”
She laid herself down with a sigh. I sat on the floor, waiting for her to close her eyes.
“How come,” she murmured, “you haven’t aged in three years, and me? a thousand.” She laughed quietly. One large tear moved from her right eye and dissolved into the pillow.
“Aw, shit,” she mourned.
“Tell me,” I prompted. “Say it. What?”
“I was there,” Constance murmured. “Twenty years ago. At the studio. Halloween night.”
I held my breath. Behind me, a shadow moved into the doorway, Crumley was there, quiet and listening.
Constance stared out past me at another year and another night.
“It was the wildest party I’d ever seen. Everyone in masks, nobody knowing who or what was drinking which or why. There was hooch on every sound stage and barking in the alleys, and if Tara and Atlanta had been built that night they would have burned. There must have been two hundred dress and three hundred undress extras, running booze back and forth through that graveyard tunnel as if Prohibition was in full swing. Even with hooch legal, I guess it’s hard to give up the fun, yes? Secret passages between the tombs and the turkeys, like the flop films rotting in the vaults? Little did they know they’d brick the damn tunnel up, a week later, after the accident.”
The accident of the year, I thought. Arbuthnot dead, and the studio gun-shot and dropping like a herd of elephants.
“It was no accident,” whispered Constance.
Constance gathered a private darkness behind her pale face.
“Murder,” she said. “Suicide.”
The pulse jumped in my hand. She held it, tight.
“Yeah,” she nodded, “suicide and murder. We never found out how, why, or what. You saw the papers. Two cars at Gower and Santa Monica, late, and no one to see. All the masked people ran off in their masks. The studio alleys were like those Venetian canals at dawn, all the gondolas empty, and the docks littered with earrings and underwear. I ran, too. The rumors later said Sloane found Arbuthnot with Sloane’s wife out back or over the wall. Or maybe Arbuthnot found Sloane with his own wife. My God, if you love another man’s wife and she makes love to her own husband at a lunatic party, wouldn’t that drive you mad?! So one car tailgates another at top speed. Arbuthnot after the Sloanes at eighty miles an hour. Rear-ended them at Gower, rammed them into a pole. The news hit the party! Doc Phillips, Manny, and Groc rushed out. They carried the victims into the Catholic church nearby. Arbuthnot’s church. Where he put money as his fire escape, his escape from hell, he said. But it was too late. They died and were taken across the street to the mortuary. I was long since gone. At the studio the next day Doc and Groc looked like pallbearers at their own funerals. I finished the last scene of the last film I ever made by noon. The studio shut down for a week. They hung crepe on every sound stage and sprayed fake clouds of fog and mist in every street, or is that true? The headlines said the three of them were all happy drunk, going home. No. It was vengeance running to kill love. The poor male bastards and the poor lovesick bitch were buried across the wall where the hooch once ran, two days later. The graveyard tunnel was bricked up and—hell,” she sighed, “I thought it was all over. But tonight, with the tunnel open, and Arbuthnot’s fake body on that wall, and that terrible man with the sad, mad eyes in your film, it’s started again. What’s it all mean?”
Her clock ran down, her voice faded, she was going to sleep. Her mouth twitched. Ghosts of words came out, in bits and pieces.
“Poor holy man. Sap …”
“What holy man sap?” I asked.
Crumley leaned forward in the doorway.
Constance, deep under, drowning, gave answer:
“. . . priest. Poor crock. Dumped on. Studio barging in. Blood in the baptistry. Bodies, my God, bodies everywhere. Poor sap …”
“St. Sebastian’s? That poor sap?”
“Sure, sure. Poor him. Poor everyone,” murmured Constance. “Poor Arby, that sad stupid genius. Poor Sloane. Poor wife. Emily Sloane. What was it she said that night? Going to live forever. Boy! What a surprise to wake up nowhere. Poor Emily. Poor Hollyhock House. Poor me.”
“Poor what was that again?”
“Hol …” Constance’s voice slurred … “ly … ock … House …. ”
And she slept.
“Hollyhock House? No film by that name,” I murmured.
“No,” said Crumley, moving into the room. “Not a film. Here.”
He reached under the night table and pulled the telephone directory out and turned the pages. He ran his finger down and read aloud:
“Hollyhock House Sanitarium. That’s half a block over and half a block north of St. Sebastian’s Catholic church, yes?”
Crumley leaned close to her ear.
“Constance,” he said. “Hollyhock House. Who’s there?”
Constance moaned, covered her eyes, and turned away. To the wall she addressed some few final words about a night a long time ago.
“. . . going to live forever … little did she know … poor everyone … poor Arby … poor priest … poor sap …”
Crumley arose, muttering. “Hell. Damn. Sure. Hollyhock House. A stone’s throw from—”
“St. Sebastian’s,” I finished. “Why,” I added, “do I have this feeling you’ll be taking me there?”
59
“You,” Crumley said to me at breakfast, “look like death warmed over. You,” he pointed his buttered toast at Constance, “look like Justice without Mercy.”
“What do I look like?” asked Henry.
“Can’t see you.”
“Figures,” said the blind man.
“Clothes off,” said Constance, dazed, like someone reading from an idiot board. “Time for a swim. My place!”
We drove to Constance’s place.
Fritz telephoned.
“Have you got the middle for my film,” he cried, “or was it the beginning? Now we need a redo of the Sermon on the Mount!”
“Does it need redoing?” I almost yelled.
“Have you looked at it lately?” Fritz, over the phone, did his imitation of Crumley pulling out his last strands of hair. “Do it! Then write a narration for the whole damn film to cover the ten thousand other pits, pimples, and rump-sprung behinds of our epic. Have you read the whole Bible, lately?”
“Not exactly.”
Fritz tore some more hair. “Go skim!”
“Skim!?”
“Skip pages. Be at the studio at five o’clock with a sermon to knock my socks off and a narration to make Orson Welles spoil his shoes! Your Unterseeboot Kapitän says: Dive!”
He submerged, and was gone.
“Clothes off,” said Constance, still half asleep. “Everyone in!”
We swam. I followed Constance as far out in the surf as I could go, then the seals welcomed and
swam her away.
“Lord,” said Henry, sitting hip deep in water. “First bath I had in years!”
We finished five bottles of champagne before two o’clock and were suddenly almost happy.
Then somehow I sat down, wrote my Sermon on the Mount, and read it aloud to the sound of the waves.
When I finished Constance said, quietly, “Where do I sign up for Sunday school?”
“Jesus,” said blind Henry, “would have been proud.”
“I dub thee,” Crumley poured champagne in my ear, “genius.”
“Hell,” I said modestly.
I went back in and for good measure rode Joseph and Mary into Bethlehem, lined up the wise men, positioned the Babe on a pallet of hay while the animals watched with incredulous eyes, and in the midst of midnight camel trains, strange stars, and miraculous births, I heard Crumley behind me say:
“Poor holy man sap.”
He dialed information.
“Hollywood?” he said. “St. Sebastian’s church?”
60
At three-thirty Crumley dropped me at St. Sebastian’s.
He examined my face and saw not only my skull but what rattled inside.
“Stop it!” he ordered. “You got that dumb smug-ass look pasted on your mouth like a circus flier. Which means you trip, but I fall downstairs!”
“Crumley!”
“Well, Christ almighty, what about that mill race under the bones and through the wall last night, and Roy in permanent hiding, and Blind Henry cane-whipping the air, fighting off spooks, and Constance who might scare again tonight and show up to yank off my Band-Aids. This was my idea to bring you here! but now you stand there like a high I.Q. clown about to jump off a cliff!”
“Poor holy man. Poor sap. Poor priest,” I replied.
“Oh, no you don’t!”
And Crumley drove off.
61
I wandered through a church that was small in dimension but burning bright with accoutrements. I stood looking at an altar that must have used up five million dollars’ worth of gold and silver. The Christ figure up front, if melted down, could have bought half of the U.S. Mint. It was while I was standing there stunned by the light coming off that cross that I heard Father Kelly behind me.
“Is that the screenwriter who telephoned with the problem?” he called quietly from across the pews.
I studied the incredibly bright altar. “You must have had many rich worshipers, father,” I said.
Arbuthnot, I thought.
“No, it’s an empty church in an empty time.” Father Kelly plowed down the aisle and stuck out a big paw. He was tall, six feet five, and with the muscularity of an athlete. “We are lucky to have a few parishioners whose consciences make constant problems. They force their money on the church.”
“You tell the truth, father.”
“I’d damn well better or God will get me.” He laughed. “It’s rough taking money from ulcerating sinners, but it’s better than having them throw it at the horses. They’ve a better chance of winning here, for I do scare the Jesus into them. While the psychiatrists are busy talking, I give one hell of a yell, which knocks the pants off half my parish and makes the rest put theirs back on. Come sit. Do you like scotch? I often think, if Christ lived now, would he serve that and would we mind? That’s Irish logic. Come along.”
In his office, he poured two snifters.
“I can see by your eyes you hate the stuff,” observed the priest. “Leave it. Have you come about that fool’s film they’re just finishing at the studio over there? Is Fritz Wong as mad as some say?”
“And as fine.”
“It’s good to hear a writer praise his boss. I rarely did.”
“You!?” I exclaimed.
Father Kelly laughed. “As a young man I wrote nine screenplays, none ever shot, or should have been shot, at sunrise. Until age thirty-five I did my damnedest to sell, sell-out, get-in, get-on. Then I said to hell with it and joined the priesthood, late. It was hard. The church does not take such as me off the streets frivolously. But I sprinted through seminary in style, for I had worked on a mob of Christian documentary films. Now what of you?”
I sat laughing.
“What’s funny?” asked Father Kelly.
“I have this notion that half the writers at the studio, knowing about your years of writing, might just sneak over here not for confession but answers! How do you write this scene, how end that, how edit, how—”
“You’ve rammed the boat and sunk the crew!” The priest downed his whiskey and refilled, chortling, and then he and I rambled, like two old screen toughs, over movie-script country. I told him my Messiah, he told me his Christ.
Then he said: “Sounds like you’ve done well, patching the script. But then the old boys, two thousand years back, did patchwork too, if you remark the difference between Matthew and John.”
I stirred in my chair with a furious need to babble, but dared not throw boiling oil on a priest while he dispensed cool holy spring water.
I stood up. “Well, thanks, father.”
He looked at my outstretched hand. “You carry a gun,” he said, easily, “but you’ve not fired it. Put your behind back on that chair.”
“Do all priests talk like that?”
“In Ireland, yes. You’ve danced around the tree, but shaken no apples. Shake.”
“I think I will have a bit of this.” I picked up the snifter and sipped. “Well … Imagine that I were a Catholic—”
“I’m imagining.”
“In need of confession—”
“They always are.”
“And came here after midnight—”
“An odd hour.” But a candle was lit in each of his eyes.
“And knocked on the door—”
“Would you do that?” He leaned slightly toward me. “Go on.”
“Would you let me in?” I asked.
I might have shoved him back in his chair.
“Once, weren’t churches open all hours?” I pursued.
“Long ago,” he said, much too quickly.
“So, father, any night I came in dire need, you would not answer?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” The candlelight flared in his eyes, as if I had raised the wick to quicken the flare.
“For the worst sinner, maybe, in the history of the world, father?”
“There’s no such creature.” Too late, his tongue froze on this last dread noun. His eyes swiveled and batted. He revised his proclamation to give it a new go-round.
“No such person lives.”
“But,” I pursued, “what if damnation, Judas himself, came begging—” I stopped—“late?”
“Iscariot? I’d wake for him, yes.”
“And what if, father, this lost terrible man in need should knock not one night a week but most nights of the year? Would you wake, or ignore the knock?”
That did it. Father Kelly leaped up as if I had pulled the great cork. The color sank from his cheeks and the skin at the roots of his hair.
“You have need to be elsewhere. I will not keep you.”
“No, father.” I floundered to be brave. “You need me to be gone. There was a knock on your door—” I blundered on— “twenty years ago this week, late. Asleep, you heard the door banged—”
“No, no more of this! Get off!”
It was the terrified shout of Starbuck, decrying Ahab’s blasphemy and his final lowering for the great white flesh.
“Out!”
“Out? You did go out, father.” My heart jumped and almost slewed me in my chair. “And let in the crash and the din and the blood. Perhaps you heard the cars strike. Then the footsteps and then the bang and the voices yelling. Maybe the accident got out of hand, if accident it was. Maybe they needed a proper midnight witness, someone to see but not tell. You let in the truth and have kept it since.”
I rose to stand and almost fainted. My rise, as if we were on weights and pulleys, sank the priest back, all but boneless, i
n his chair.
“You were witness, father, were you not? For it’s just a few yards off and, on Halloween night, 1934, didn’t they bring the victims here?”
“God help me,” mourned the priest, “yes.”
One moment full of fiery air, Father Kelly now gave up his inflammatory ghost and sank, fold on fold, flesh on flesh, into himself.
“Were they all dead when the crowd carried them in?”
“Not all,” said the priest, in shocked recall.
“Thanks, father.”
“For what?” He had closed his eyes with the headache of remembrance and now sprang them wide in renewed pain. “Do you know what you’ve got into?!”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“Then go home, wash your face and, sinful advice, get drunk!”
“It’s too late for that. Father Kelly, did you give the last rites to any or all?”
Father Kelly shook his head back and forth, wigwagging as if to sign away the ghosts.
“Suppose I did?!”
“The man named Sloane?”
“Was dead. I blessed him, in spite.”
“The other man—?”
“The big one, the famous one, the all powerful—?”
“Arbuthnot,” I finished.
“Him, I signed and spoke and touched with water. And then he died.”
“Cold and dead, stretched out forever, really dead?”
“Christ, the way you put it!” He sucked air and expelled it: “All that—yes!”
“And the woman?” I asked.
“Was the worst!” he cried, new paleness firing the old paleness in his cheeks. “Daft. Crazed and worse than crazed. Out of mind and body and not to be put back in. Trapped between the two. My God, it reminded me of plays I’d seen as a young man. Snow falling. Ophelia suddenly dressed in a terrible pale quiet as she steps into the water and does not so much drown as melt into a final madness, a silence so cold you could not cut it with a knife or sound it with a shout. Not even death could shake that woman’s newfound winter. You hear that? A psychiatrist said that once! The eternal winter. Snow country from which rare travelers return. The Sloane woman, caught between bodies, out there in the rectory, not knowing how to escape. So she just turned to drown herself. The bodies were taken out by the studio people who had brought them in for respite.”