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“Bull’s-eye.”
“Proceed.”
I proceeded.
“This chair here is for the Mount Lowe collector of old newspapers.”
“Who will testify in absentia?”
“In absentia. This next chair is for Queen Califia, long gone, with her palmistry and head bumps.”
I kept moving. “Third chair: Father Rattigan. Fourth chair: Grauman’s Chinese mile-high projectionist. Fifth chair: J. W. Bradford, a.k.a. Tallulah, Garbo, Swanson, Colbert. Sixth: Professor Quickly, a.k.a. Scrooge, Nicholas Nickleby, Richard the Third. Seventh chair: me. Eighth chair: Constance.”
“Hold on.”
Crumley got up and pinned his badge on my shirt.
“We going to sit here,” said Fritz, “and listen to a fourth-rate Nancy Drew—”
“Stash your monocle,” said Crumley.
Fritz stashed his monocle.
“Now,” said Crumley, “junior?”
Junior moved behind the chairs.
“For starters, I’m Rattigan running in the rain with two Books of the Dead. Some already dead, some about to die.”
I laid the two books on the glass-top table.
“We all know now that Quickly, in a spurt of nostalgic madness, sent the one book, with all the dead people, to frighten Constance. She came running from her past, her memories of a fast, furious, and destructive life.”
“You can say that again,” said Crumley.
I waited.
“Sorry,” said Crumley.
I picked up the second book, Constance’s more personal, recent phone lists.
“But what if Constance, hit by the old Book of the Dead, got wired back into her griefs, her losses in that past, and decided, in order to make do with it, she had to destroy it, person by person, one by one. What if she red-lined the names and forgot she had done it?”
“What if?” Crumley sighed.
“Let the idiot express his delight.” Fritz Wong tucked his monocle back in his eye and leaned forward. “So the Rattigan goes to kill, maim, or at least threaten her own past, ja?” he said with heavy Germanic concern.
“Is that the way the next scene plays?” I asked.
“Action,” said Fritz, amused.
I swayed behind the first empty chair.
“Here we are at the dead end of the old trolley-tram line on Mount Lowe.”
Fritz and Crumley nodded, seeing the mummy there, wrapped in headlines.
“Wait.” Blind Henry squinted. “Okay, I’m there.”
