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“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.”
“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?”
