Crowned Heads (58 page)

“‘When I was in knee pants’”—
bump
!

“Please … ?”

“‘My mama done tol’ me—Son-n-n!’”

“Please, Judee … ?”

Bump.
She wouldn’t hear him. The carpet grew more red, a darker one, from the blood. The dogs, as though knowing what and whose it was, daintily avoided it, sat staring up, mute and motionless.

The girl talked over her shoulder as she worked the pedals, monotonously playing the keys. “I thought you were terrific in the movie, Willie. Fedora was really a big star, huh?”

“Yes … biggest of them all …”

“That was funny, when she threw the apple to the queen.” She thought a moment. “Joan Crawford—didn’t she used to be a movie star?”

“Will always be a movie star, Joan Crawford. Judee … can you … take those things out of me?”

“The darts? Oh, gee, I don’t think so. Arco …” She thought a moment and looked at him curiously. “He said you wanted to get hurt. Did you?”

“Get hurt?”

“No,
want
to. He said you liked it.”

“People like different things. Judee—listen … I’m going to die….”

“Ooh.” She gave a little squeal and waved her fingers as if drying her nail polish. “I toldja—I don’t like that word.”

“In the drawer, there in the altar—my rosary. Give it to me.”

She found the chain of beads in the drawer and climbed up to put them in his hand, hanging them over his fingers, which twitched as they touched the pendant cross.

“Upstairs,” he told her, “in the front bedroom—a dresser. There’s money in the third drawer….”

Her face lighted up; she glanced toward the doorway and put her finger to her mouth. He shook his head.

“For Masses. Have a Mass said … for my soul, will you?”

She nodded, batting her eyelashes at him. She was sucking her fingers, like a baby. “I got this darn hangnail.” Her lips curled; she blew him a kiss. Then she blurred before his eyes, he watched the gleam of silver, heard her platforms rattle over the vinyl, and she was swallowed up by the darkness. He was growing steadily weaker. It was all a joke, but he was going to die of the joke.

Sometime later Arco reappeared out of the darkness. Had he shrunk? He looked somehow smaller, less ferocious; even light of heart.

“How’s it going, pops?” Willie stared down at him, saying nothing. “Some big house you got here. Been through every room; can’t find it.” No reply. “Y’know? The safe?”

“Safe.” Willie echoed the word with grim mirth. “You haven’t looked, Arco.”

“You bet your ass I’ve looked. Tell me—you’re way up there, what d’you hear from God, Little Willie?”

“God?” he echoed stupidly.

“You still believe in God, Willie?”

“I … believe.”

“Then have him make a miracle, Willie. Have him get you down from there.”

“Doesn’t … matter.”

“You’re right, Willie. Nothing matters much, does it? I’ll make you a trade. I’ll trade you your life for that mirror—how’s that?”

“Cheap at … half the price.” His laugh was little more than a croak.

“You don’t want to die for a mirror? Or do you want to die for God? Which?”

“Don’t want to die….”

“Course you don’t, Willie; nobody does, when you finally get down to it. You don’t know what’s over there, on the other side, do you? That’s the trouble; no one does. Hamlet’s problem. Maybe God’s not even there, huh? Did you ever think of that? Do you really believe in Him?”

Willie considered the question, but made no reply.

Judee had returned, stood hugging herself and whimpering. “Arco … ?” she murmured. “What’s going to happen? What if he dies? It’ll be murder. We’ll go to prison.”

Arco gave a raspberry laugh. “Wimp, you’re in California, the land of nuts and fruits. They’re used to this sort of thing. You can get out in seven years, with good behavior.”

“How come?”

“They parole you. It’s the law.” He turned back to the figure on the cross. “Last chance, Willie. You want to tell?”

Arco watched him closely.

The old man’s head moved, changed its angle so he could look down. The attenuated tendons of his body gave him the look of an El Greco figure, the martyr in the flesh. He was demonstrating some kind of pitiful bravado; it was foolish, capricious, lacking any consequence whatever, yet it was an admirable, dogged sort of pluck, the determined truculence of the aged. His mouth opened, there were salivating clicking sounds behind his teeth. He worked his jaws and lips and tongue, finally pushing his dental plate forward. The double row of teeth emerged grotesquely and fell on the carpets.

“Ith thith,” he lisped.

“Yes?”

“I—defy—you.”

Arco’s look was mildly curious; he examined the face at length, almost tenderly. “To the death, Willie?”

“Yeth.”

Arco shrugged lightly, as though the matter were of small concern to him. “I’ll say this—you’ve got guts.” He stood looking up and what Willie saw through his clouded vision was the grinning face of the buccaneer’s flag. Arco peered out past the chapel doors. Yes, the sky was getting lighter; somewhere a mockingbird sang, louder, more brashly. He shouted for Bill, then went out again.

Later, it was lighter still. They returned together, all three. With a watchful attitude, the girl dropped onto the organ bench in the silver dress, while Bill lounged against the doorjamb. “Heck, I sure am sorry ’bout this, Willie,” he said. “We was havin’ such a right nice evenin’.”

Arco had come with tools: a hammer and a box of nails. “You’ve been wanting this right along,” he said, not looking up, but climbing onto the bench and proceeding with his work.

“Hail Mary, full of grathe,” Willie prayed, when he saw what the intention was. “The Lord ith with me.”

The hammering shattered the silence, sending shocks along the wood of the cross, and the screams that came with it enraged the cockatoo in the palmetto tree. The rosary slipped from Willie’s fingers.

“Blethed art Thou among women.”

The girl hugged her knees and shivered in horrified fascination as the hammering continued.

“Jesus,” Bill said, awed. “What a freaking sight.”

“And blethed ith the fruit of Thy womb, Jeethuth.”

The hammering went on. Arco worked nimbly, like some crazed carpenter, holding the nails between his teeth before driving them with the heavy steel head.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for uth thinnerths now and at the hour of our death amen.”

“A-men,”
Arco said.

Judee called the dogs to her, and took them on her lap, cuddling them and fondling the silky hair of their ears, as, with a dishcloth, Bill sopped blood from the carpet and drew arcane images across the slashed damask, his sweeping movements causing the small picture on the back wall to tilt across its hook. Nobody noticed. Bill was engaged in his task, Arco in his, the girl watching while the brown body jerked and wrenched in frantic spasms, stretching and loosening the cords so it sagged in the middle. Yet he remained hanging upright; the head jerked back at every thudding shock, the skull striking the upright with a hollow sound. The cries grew more feeble, became moans, ended.

“What he wanted all along,” Arco said. He flung away the hammer, got down, and stalked from the room. The victim moaned, rolling his eyes to the side, then at Judee. Seeing what he required, she picked up the rosary and put it back into his twitching fingers, whose tips fumbled the chain of beads. He was mumbling frantic snatches of prayers.

In his burning head was one idea, one single notion. He would go to his reward, he would sit on the right hand of God, he would see the pearly gates, angels with halos, gold harps, white feathered wings, he would be possessed of the peace that surpasseth all, life everlasting, the promise of Christ, the Resurrection and the Light.

Or would he? The vision he had conjured with its attendant images separated into a sort of double vision, trembled, then dissolved, like a desert mirage, leaving only darkness in his mind. The rosary again slipped from his hand, the crucifix glinted on the red rug. “Forget … the Math,” he murmured.

“Forget the Mass?” the girl repeated, incredulous. “Why?”

“I don’t believe,” he whispered, not to her but to the portrait. “I never did….” His words trailed away in a wondering tone; on his lips was a weary, rueful smile, touched by some private irony. He did not speak again.

Arco had come in still wearing his habit, and was listening. “See,” he said, his face alight with passion, “I knew it.” With a wild rush he kicked open the gate, and, the purple cassock sweeping around his legs, he sprang onto the bench, reaching on tiptoe to clutch the naked, quivering shoulders in a fearful grasp, and planting his lips on the old man’s. The two mouths remained pressed together, then Arco pulled away and released him.
“Ciao, caro,”
he said, and stepped down, panting.

“You kissed him!” the girl exclaimed, with a little shudder.

“Shut up, Wimp,” he told her angrily. Then, more mildly, “It was the kiss not of passion but of peace.” His voice had grown soft, almost meditative, as he surveyed the effect of his deft carpentering. It was the final agony. It could not go on; it had to end. But the old man was stronger than he looked, the light would not go out, the spirit would not be quenched, and what breath was left was given up only reluctantly. Arco eyed him with both regret and a mute respect. Then, with a rush, at last, everything went lax, Willie lost control, his stomach churned and heaved; his bowels loosened. He suffered the final humiliation in mortified silence, lifting his chin away, and his eyes.

He died shortly afterward.

They looked upon the cadaver, the wildly staring eyes, the indignantly arched nostrils, the rictus of the mouth gaping in shocked protest, and Michael Gino Archangelo appeared to be satisfied. As a final touch he had taken Fedora’s crown and tilted it onto the bloodied head.

Outside, dark nocturnal shapes had taken on a pale, wan reality. Early traffic moved along the boulevards. The fog had lifted but in its place a skein of acrid smog was already being spun out over the flats. The Mode O’Day sign had gone off, and buildings assumed their unremarkable, commonplace shapes in the dull but persistently growing light. The feeble early sun drew upward. It would not be a lovely day.

It was inevitable that before leaving, one of the three should have noticed the picture askew on the back wall, and the safe hidden behind it. They scrambled among the wreckage, searching for the second key that had hung on the dead man’s neck. Inside the safe they found what they had been hunting, the Medici mirror. The corpse watched them remove it, examine it, gloat; it would bring them five thousand dollars. It would take them to the South Pacific. It would save mankind.

They had found one unbroken champagne bottle and one Baccarat goblet. The cork exploded, hit the ceiling, and bounced; foam spurted in all directions. “Ooh,” the girl cried. “Be careful, you’ll get it on my dress.” She crouched to hunt under the furniture for the cork: a souvenir.

They celebrated, clustered around the piano. The girl felt the bubbles popping against her nose; then she was crying.

“Why,” she said, looking at the cross, “that nice old man—he didn’t even say goodbye.”

T
HE BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL,
a mock-Spanish pile of pink stucco shaded by awnings, is situated on Sunset Boulevard between Beverly Drive and Benedict Canyon. Across from it is a small public park with green sloping lawns and seasonal floral plantings under rows of stately Washington palm trees. High-salaried nurses sit there on benches rocking babies in rubber-wheeled carriages and reading paperback novels. It is a common sight, and one that Barry Detweiller saw one noontime in 1957, passing in his rented car on the way to an appointment at the hotel. He drove under the porte-cochère, where he received from a red-jacketed attendant a numbered parking ticket, passed through the portico into the lobby, where busy bellboys with pillbox hats and chin straps were wheeling luggage across the floral carpeting, turned right, then took the first left, into the Polo Lounge. The dim room was already filling for lunch, and men relaxed at the bar before the East-Indian-style gold-leafed mural, drinking whiskey sours, or sat at the semi-circular banquettes, holding important conversations on plug-in phone extensions. They wore suits with narrow lapels and pink shirts, some blue, or even white. The women’s skirts were cut at mid-calf and their hats were bell-shaped, with touches of veils or narrow feathers. Barry gave his name to the headwaiter, who led him out into the sunny patio, where a table had been reserved in a quiet corner under the arbor. Scarlet bougainvillaea climbed the pink walls, there were red and yellow hibiscus and white star jasmine. The tablecloths and napkins more or less matched the stucco.

Barry had been sent by
Life
magazine to Hollywood to do a story on the popular Bobbitt movies, and their star, Bobby Ransome. Last night there had been a party in honor of the child phenomenon, given by Willie and Bee Marsh. Barry had already done several studio interviews with Little Willie concerning the upswing in his professional fortunes, and the actor had stated for publication that he never could have done it without Bee. It was the first time Barry had been to the Marsh residence on Cordelia Way. The party had been enormous, with many famous people present. Bogie and Betty were there, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Hedda and Louella. There was a mambo band by the pool, in which gardenias and candles had been floated, and a dance floor laid over the lawn. There was a striped tent with strolling musicians playing personal requests, the waiters wore military braid on their mess jackets, the buffet was flanked by silver candelabra with fifteen-inch candles, and épergnes filled with grapes and peaches from the Farmer’s Market. People said that Bobby’s cheeks looked like those peaches. In the center of the buffet was a stupendous ice sculpture, a reproduction of the crown the child star had worn in
Bobbitt Royal.
Later, guests were invited to view the recently installed private chapel, while Bee lectured at length on its various features: the cross that was made of cedar wood from Lebanon, brought across the Mediterranean by the Knights of Malta; the Quattrocento painting of the Virgin; the coffer containing a bone from the foot of Saint Tribonius; the Bible that had belonged to Cardinal Richelieu; the altar cloth embroidered by the nuns of Bruges. On the game room piano were silver-framed pictures of Pius XII, the cardinal, the archbishop of the diocese, and the local bishop. Bee declared that now that her Billyboy was safely in the bosom of the Church she could die a happy woman; Willie replied that he never would have done it without her showing him the way. Though Barry Detweiller had admired such filial devotion, he found Beetrice Marsh grossly overbearing, the cliché of the stage mother. Her humor was waspish, her urges willful, she was loud, brash, and extremely clever, but far too old to be as giddy as she appeared. On the other hand, he had found Willie to be exactly what he’d expected—generous, considerate, charming, and a witty raconteur. “The Grand Old Man of Hollywood.”