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I wanted to call out, Do you remember? But how could she?
I ducked my head. Her camera whirred.
It was at that exact moment that Roy Holdstrom arrived.
He stood in the commissary doorway, searching. Finding me, he did not wave but jerked his head furiously. Then he turned and stalked out. I jumped to my feet and ran off before Fritz Wong could trap me.
I saw Roy vanishing into the Men’s outside, and found him standing at the white porcelain shrine worshiping Respighi’s Fountains of Rome. I stood beside him, noncreative, the old pipes frozen for the winter.
“Look. I found this on Stage 13 just now.”
Roy shoved a typewritten page onto the tile shelf before me.
The Beast Born at Last!
The Brown Derby Tonight!
Vine Street. Ten o’clock.
Be there! or you lose everything!
“You don’t believe this!” I gasped.
“As much as you believed your note and went to the damn graveyard.” Roy stared at the wall in front of him. “That’s the same paper and typeface as your note? Will I go to the Brown Derby tonight? Hell, why not? Bodies on walls, missing ladders, raked-over prints in grass, papier-mâché corpses, plus Manny Leiber screaming. I got to thinking, five minutes ago, if Manny and the others were upset by the scarecrow dummy, what if it suddenly disappeared, then what?”
“You didn’t?” I said.
“No?” said Roy.
Roy pocketed the note. Then he took a small box from a corner table and handed it to me. “Someone’s using us. I decided to do a little using myself. Take it. Go in the booth. Open it up.”
I did just that.
I shut the door.
“Don’t just stand there,” called Roy. “Open it!”
“I am, I am.”
I opened the box and stared in.
“My God!” I cried.
“What do you see?” said Roy.
“Arbuthnot!”
“Fits in the box real nice and neat, huh?” said Roy.
13
“What made you do it?”
“Cats are curious. I’m a cat,” said Roy, hustling along.
We were headed back toward the commissary.
Roy had the box tucked under his arm, and a vast grin of triumph on his face.
