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“Arbuthnot!” cried Constance in a burst of intuition.
A shadow crossed her face. She reached for a bathrobe and clothed herself, suddenly very small, a girl child who turned to look down along the coast, as if it were not sand and tide, but the years themselves.
“Arbuthnot,” she murmured. “Christ, what a beauty! What a creator.” She paused. “I’m glad he’s dead,” she added.
“Not quite,” I stopped.
For Constance had whirled, as if shot.
“No!” she cried.
“No, a thing like him. A thing propped up on a wall to scare me, and now, you!”
Tears of relief burst from her eyes. She gasped as if struck in the stomach.
“Damn you! Go inside,” she said. “Get the vodka.”
I brought the vodka and a glass. I watched her throw back two slugs. I was suddenly sober forever, tired of seeing people drink, tired of being afraid when night came.
I could think of nothing to say so I went to the edge of her pool, took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants, and soaked my feet in the water, looking down, waiting.
At last Constance came and sat beside me.
“You’re back,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said. “Old memories die hard.”
“They sure as hell do,” I said, looking along the coastline now myself. “At the studio this week, panic attacks. Why would everyone fly apart at a wax dummy in the rain that looked like Arbuthnot?”
“Is that what happened?”
I told her the rest, as I had told it to Crumley, ending with the Brown Derby and my need for her to go there with me. When I
finished, Constance, paler, finished one more vodka.
“I wish I knew what I’m supposed to be scared about!” I said. “Who wrote that note to get me to the graveyard, so I’d introduce a fake Arbuthnot to a waiting world. But I didn’t tell the studio I found the dummy, so they found and tried to hide it, almost wild with fear. Is the memory of Arbuthnot that terrible so long after his death?”
“Yes.” Constance put her trembling hand on my wrist. “Oh, yes.”
“Now what? Blackmail? Does someone write Manny Leiber and demand money or more notes will reveal the studio’s past, Arbuthnot’s life? Reveal what? A lost reel of film maybe from twenty years ago, on the night Arbuthnot died. Film at the scene of the accident, maybe, which, if shown, would burn Constantinople, Tokyo, Berlin, and the whole backlot?”
“Yes!” Constance’s voice was far back in some other year. “Get out now. Run. Did you ever dream a big black two-ton bulldog comes in the night and eats you up? A friend of mine had that dream. The big black bulldog ate him. We called it World War II. He’s gone forever. I don’t want you gone.”
“Constance, I can’t quit. If Roy’s alive—”
“You don’t know that.”
“—and I get him out of there and help him get his job back because it’s the only right thing to do. I got to. It’s all so unfair.”
“Go out in the water, argue with the sharks, you’ll get a better deal. You really want to go back to Maximus studios after what you just told me? God. Do you know the last day I was ever there? The afternoon of Arbuthnot’s funeral.”
She let that sink me. Then she threw the anchor after it.
“It was the end of the world. I never saw so many sick and dying people in one place. It was like watching the Statue of Liberty crack and fall. Hell. He was Mount Rushmore after an earth-quake. Forty times bigger, stronger, greater than Cohn, Zanuck, Warner, and Thalberg rolled in one knish. When they slammed his casket lid in that tomb across the wall, cracks ran all the way uphill to where the Hollywoodland sign fell. It was Roosevelt, dying long before his death.”
Constance stopped for she could hear my uneasy breathing.
Then she said: “Look, is there a brain in my head? Did you know Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day? Think! It’s all the redwoods in the world cut so the thunder never stops. Antarctica melts down in tears. Christ gapes his wounds. God holds his breath. Caesar’s legions, ghosts, ten million, rise, with bleeding Amazons for eyes. I wrote that when I was sixteen and a sap, when I found out that Juliet and Don Quixote fell dead on the same day, and I cried all night. You’re the only one ever heard those silly lines. Well, that’s how it was when Arbuthnot died. I was sixteen again and couldn’t stop crying or writing junk. There went the moon, the planets, Sancho Panza, Rosinante, and Ophelia. Half the women at his funeral were old mistresses. A between-the-sheets fan club, plus nieces, girl cousins, and crazy aunts. When we opened our eyes that day it was the second Johnstown flood. Jesus, I do run on. I hear they still got Arbuthnot’s chair in his old office? Anyone sat in it since with a big enough butt and a brain to fit?”
