Let's All Kill Constance (17 page)

I looked at Crumley, he looked at me, and we both looked at Blind Henry. He felt our gaze, nodded.

Fritz was already gone, the vodka with him.

"Lead the way," said Henry. "Swear a little now and then to give me direction."

Crumley and I headed for Crumley's old jalopy, Henry in our wake.

Fritz, in his car ahead, banged his motor, blew his horn.

"Okay, you damn Kraut!" cried Crumley.

He thrummed his engine, exploding.

"Which way to the nearest road rage, dammit?"

We paused by the storm drain, stared in, then out at the open road.

"Which is it, smart-ass?" said Crumley. "Dante's Inferno or Route 66?"

"Let me think," I said.

"Oh,
no
you don't!" Crumley cried.

Fritz was gone. We looked along the beach and couldn't see his car anywhere.

We looked to our right. There, speeding off down the tunnel, were two red lights. "Christ!" Crumley yelled. "He's heading in on the flood channel! Damned fool!"

"What are we going to do?" I said.

"Nothing," cried Crumley. "Just this!" He rammed the gas. We swerved and plunged into the tunnel.

"Madness!" I cried.

"Damn tootin'," said Crumley. "Goddamn!"

"I'm glad I can't see this," Henry said from the backseat, speaking to the wind in his face.

We raced up the flood channel, heading inland.

"Can we do it?" I cried. "How high is the flood channel?"

"Most places it's ten feet high," Crumley shouted. "The farther in we get, the higher the ceilings. Floods come down the mountains in Glendale, then the channel has to be really big to take the flood. Hold on!"

Ahead of us, Fritz's car had almost vanished. "Idiot!" I said. "Does he really know where he's going?"

"Yes!" said Crumley. "All the way to Grauman's Chinese then left to the goddamn marble orchard."

The sound of our motor was shattering. In that thunder we saw ahead of us a tide of those lunatics who had assaulted me. "My God," I cried. "We'll hit them! Don't slow down! Those crazies! Keep going!"

We raced along the channel. Our engine roared. The history of LA. streamed past us on the walls: pictographs, graffiti, crazed illustrations left by wandering homeless in 1940, 1930, 1925, faces and images of terrible things and nothing alive.

Crumley floored the gas. We plunged at the crazed underground mob who shrieked and screamed a horrible welcome. But Crumley didn't slow. We cut through them, tossed them aside.

One ghost rose up flailing, gibbering.

Ed, Edward, Eddie, oh Eduardo! I thought. Is that you?

"You never said good-bye!" the ghost raved and fell away.

I wept and we raced on, outpacing my guilt. We left all behind and the farther we went, the more terrified I became.

"How in hell do we know where we are?" I said. "There aren't any directions down here. Or we can't see them."

Crumley said, "I think that maybe, yeah, let's see." For there were signs on the walls, scribbled in chalk, some in black painted letters.

Crumley slowed the car. On the wall ahead of us someone had etched a bunch of crucifixes and cartoon tombstones.

Crumley said, "If Fritz is any guide, we're in Glendale."

"That means ..." I said.

"Yeah," he said. "Forest Lawn."

He put on his high beams and swerved the car right and left as we moved slowly, and we saw a ladder leading up to a grate covered by a manhole in the tunnel ceiling and Fritz's car beneath it, and him out of the car and climbing the ladder. A series of crosses ran alongside the ladder leading up.

We got out of the car and crossed the dry wash and began to climb the ladder. There was a thundering clang above us. We saw Fritz's shape and the manhole shoved aside, and the beginnings of a gentle rain pelting his shoulders.

We climbed the ladder in silence. Above us, Fritz was directing and shouting. "Get the hell up here, you damn fools!"

We looked down.

Blind Henry was not about to be left behind.

THE storm was over but the drizzle stayed. The sky was a loon sky—promising much, delivering little.

"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
Davids
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. "In 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.

Crumley swore under his breath. "Recite them, junior."

I recited the names, one by one.

"Holly Morgan."

Grey flicked through his file.

"She's here. Buried 1924."

"Polly Starr?"

Another quick run-through.

"Here. 1926."

"How about Molly Circe?"

"Right. 1927."

"Emily Danse?"

"1928."

"All buried here, for sure?"

Grey looked sour. "I have never once in all my life been wrong. Strange, however." He rescanned the items he had drawn out of the file. "Odd. Are they all related, all one
family?"

"How do you mean?"

Grey fixed his arctic stare at the names. "Because, see here, they're all entombed in the same aboveground Gothic stone hut."

"How's that again?" Crumley lurched from his boredom and grabbed the file cards. "What?"

"Odd, all those different surnames, put to rest in one tomb, a memorial dwelling with eight shelves for eight family members."

"But they
aren't
family!" said Fritz.

"Odd," said Grey. "Strange."

I stood as if struck by lightning.

"Hold on," I whispered.

Fritz and Crumley and Henry turned to me.

Grey lifted his snowy eyebrows. "Ye-e-ss." He made two long syllables out of it. "Well?"

"The tomb house? The family vault? There must be a name on the portico. The name chiseled in marble?"

Grey scanned his cards, making us wait.

"Rattigan," he said.

"Are you sure?"

"I have never—"

"Yes, I know! The name again!"

We all held our breath.

"Rattigan." His cold voice issued from a steel-trap mouth.

We let our air out.

At last I said, "They can't all be there in that one vault."

Grey shut his eyes. "I—"

"I know, I know," I said quickly. I stared at my friends.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Jesus Christ," murmured Crumley. "Goddamn. Can you give us directions to the Rattigan tomb?"

Grey scribbled on a notepad map. "Easy to find. There're fresh flowers out front. The tomb door is open. There will be a memorial service there tomorrow."

"Who's being entombed?"

We all waited, eyes shut, guessing the answer.

"Rattigan," said Grey, almost smiling. "Someone named Constance Rattigan."

THE rain was so thick the graveyard disappeared. All we could see as we drove uphill in an electric runabout were monuments on the side of the road. The path ahead vanished in the downpour. I carried a map on my lap, marked with an arrow and the name of the area. We stopped.

"It's there," said Crumley. "Azalia Gardens? Plot sixteen. Neo-Palladian edifice."

The rain blew back like a curtain and a flicker of lightning showed us a slender tomb with Palladian pillars on each side of a tall metal door, which stood ajar.

"So if she wants out," said Henry, "she's out. Or invite folks in. Rattigan!"

The rain lifted and blew away and the tomb waited while thunder ran along the far brim of the graveyard. The open door trembled.

Crumley spoke almost to himself: "Jesus! Constance buried herself. Name after name. Year after year. When she was done with one act, one face, one mask, she hired a tomb and stashed herself away. And now, to get the job, maybe, from Fritz, she's killing all her selves again. Don't go in there, Willie."

"She's in there now," I said.

"Horse apples," said Crumley. "Goddamn intuition?"

"No." I shivered. "Goddamn hunch. She's got to be saved." I climbed out.

"She's dead!"

"I'll save her
anyway?

"Like hell you will!" said Crumley. "You're under arrest! Get back in here!"

"You're the law, sure, but you're my friend."

I was flooded with cold rain.

"Dammit, dammit all to hell. Go on! Run, you stupid idiot! We'll be waiting downhill. I'll be goddamned if I'll sit and watch your head come flying out that goddamn door. Come find us! Damn you!"

"Hold on!" Fritz cried.

"Hold goddamn nothing!"

Fritz threw a small flask that hit me in the chest.

I stood shivering in the cold downpour and gave Fritz a long look as Crumley, cursing, got out of the runabout slowly. We stood in the big mortuary field with an open iron gate and open tomb door and the rain threatening to wash the bodies out of the earth. I shut my eyes and drank the vodka.

"Ready or not," I whispered. "Here goes."

"Goddammit," said Crumley.

it
was a dark and stormy night.

My God, I thought, again?

Feet running. A cry. Lightning, thunder, a few nights back.

And here, my God, the same again!

The gates of heaven burst, a flood poured in darkness, with me near a cold tomb with someone crazed and maybe dead deep in the dark.

Stop, I told myself.

Touch.

The outer gate creaked. The inner door squealed.

We stood in the entry of the marble tomb with the sun gone, never to return, and the rain to rain forever.

It was dark, but there were three small blue votive candles lit and wavering in the draft from the door.