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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.
