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“Are we there yet?” said Henry.
We all looked in the gates at Forest Lawn Cemetery, a sweeping hillside covered with a cannonade of memorial stones embedded like meteors in its grass.
“They say that place,” said Crumley, “has a greater voting population than Paducah, Kentucky, Red River, Wyoming, or East End, Azusa.”
“I like old-fashioned graveyards,” said Henry. “Things you can run your hands over. Tombs you can lie on like statues or bring your lady in late hours to play doctor.”
“Anyone ever gone in just to check the boy David’s fig leaf?” said Fritz.
“I hear tell,” said Henry, “when they shipped him over, there was no leaf, so he lay around the north forty a year, under canvas, so old ladies in tennis shoes wouldn’t be offended. Day before the fig leaf was glued on to spoil the fun, they had to beat off a gloveless Braille Institute convention. Live folks doing gymnastics in midnight graveyards is called foreplay. Dead folks doing the same is afterplay.”
We stood there in the drizzle looking across the way to the mortuary offices.
“Gone to earth,” I heard someone murmur. Me.
“Move!” said Crumley. “I
n thirty minutes the rain from the hills hits below. The flood will wash our cars down to the sea.”
We stared at the gaping manhole. We could hear the creek whispering below.
“My God!” said Fritz. “My classic car!”
“Move!” said Crumley.
We ducked across the street and into the mortuary building.
“Who do we ask?” I said. “And what do we ask?”
There was a moment of colliding looks, pure confusion. “Do we ask for Constance?” I said.
“Talk sense,” said Crumley. “We ask about all those newspaper headlines and names. All those lipstick aliases on the basement dressing-room mirrors.”
“Say again,” said Henry.
“I’m talking pure circumstantial metaphor,” said Crumley. “Double time!”
We double-timed it into the vast halls of death, or to put it another way, the land of clerks and file cabinets.
We did not have to take a number and wait, for a very tall man with ice-blond hair and an oyster complexion glided to the front desk and disdained us as if we were discards from a steam laundry.
He laid a card on the desktop and dared Crumley to take it. “You Grey?” he said.
“Elihu Phillips Grey, as you see.”
“We’re here to buy gravesites and plots.”
A late-winter smile appeared on Elihu P. Grey’s mouth and hung there, like a mist. With a magician’s gesture, he manifested a chart and price sheet.
Crumley ignored it. “First, I got a list.”
He pulled out all the names I had put together but placed it upside down in front of Grey, who scanned the list in silence.
So Crumley pulled forth a rolled wad of one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Hold that, will you, junior?” he said, tossing the wad to me. And then, to Grey: “You know those names?”
“I know all the names.” Grey relapsed into silence.
