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“And all,” I said, numbly, “for a joke?”
“Not quite. The studio, as you have noticed, sits astride that ravenous crack known as the San Andreas fault, ripe for quakes. I felt them months ago. So I propped the ladder and raised the dead. And raised my pay so you might say.”
“Blackmail,” Crumley whispered in the back of my mind.
Groc squirmed with joy at his own telling: “Scare Manny, Doc, J. C., everyone, including the Beast!”
“The Beast? You wanted to scare him?!”
“Why not? The mob! The bunch! Get them all to pay, as long as they didn’t find out I was behind it. Run a riot, take the payola, head for the exit!”
“Which means, good God,” I said, “you must have known everything about Arbuthnot’s past, his death. Was he poisoned? Was that it?”
“Ah,” said Groc, “theories, speculations.”
“How many people know you’ve bought that round-the-world ticket?”
“Only you, poor sad lovely doomed boy. But I think someone’s guessed. Why else is the front gate shut and me trapped?”
“Yes,” I said. “They just threw Christ’s tomb out with the lumber. They need a body to go with it.”
“Me,” Groc said, suddenly bleak.
A studio police car had pulled up beside us.
A guard leaned out.
“Manny Leiber wants you.”
Groc sank down, his flesh into his blood, his blood into his soul, his soul into nothingness.
“This is it,” whispered Groc.
I thought of Manny’s office and the mirror behind the desk and the catacombs beyond the mirror.
“Break and run,” I said.
“Fool,” said Groc. “How far would I get?” Groc patted my hand with trembling fingers. “You’re a jerk, but a good jerk. No, from here on, anyone seen with me goes down the maelstrom when they pull the chain. Here.”
He shoved his briefcase over on the seat, opened it and shut it again. I saw a flash of bundled one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Grab,” said Groc. “It’s no use to me now. Hide it fast. Highon-the-hog money for the rest of your life.”
“No, thanks.”
He gave it another shove against my leg. I pulled away, as if a dagger of ice had stabbed my knee.
“Jerk,” he said. “But a good jerk.”
I got out.
The police car, creeping ahead, its motor puttering, honked its horn quietly, once. Groc stared at it and then at me, looking at my ears, my eyelids, my chin.
“Your skin won’t need work for, oh, thirty years, give or take a year.”
His mouth was thick with phlegm. He swiveled his eyes, grasped the wheel with snatching, grappling fingers, and drove away.
The police car turned the corner, his car followed, a small funeral cortège moving toward the back studio wall.
