No good. No way. Crumley shook his head. Priests dont know or dont
give names. If I went in, asking, Id be out on my ass in two minutes. Next. The maitre d at the Derby might. And he was recognized by someone
outside the Derby that night. Someone I knew when I was a kid hanging out on my roller skates. Clarence. Ive been asking around for his last name.
Keep asking. If he knows who the Beast is, wed have something to go on. Christ, its dumb. Roy fired, you tossed into a new job, all from a clay bust. Overreaction. Riots. And how come all that uproar about a dummy on a ladder?
Exactly.
And I thought, sighed Crumley, when I saw you standing in the door, I was going to be happy that you came back into my life.
Arent you?
No, dammit. He softened his voice. Yeah, hell. But I sure wish youd left that pile of horse manure outside.
He squinted at the rising moon over his garden and said: Boy oh boy You sure got me curious. And added: Smells like blackmail!
Blackmail!?
Why go to all the trouble of writing notes, provoking innocents like you and Roy, propping fakes up on ladders, getting you to reproduce a Creature, if it didnt lead somewhere? Whats the use of a panic if you dont cash in on it. There must be more notes, more letters, right?
I saw none.
Yeah, but you were the tool, the means, to get things stirred. You didnt spill the beans. Someone else did. I bet theres a blackmail note out there somewhere tonight, says: Two hundred thousand in unmarked fifties will buy you no more reborn corpses on walls. So tell me about the studio, Crumley said, at last.
Maximus? Most successful studio in history. Still is. Variety headlined
their profit last month. Forty million net. No other studio near. Those honest figures?
Deduct five million, youve still got a studio rich as hell.
Any big problems, recently, ruckuses, upheavals, troubles? You know, any other people fired, films canceled?
Its been steady on and quiet for months.
Then that must be it. The profits! I mean. Everything going along nice and easy and then something happens, doesnt look like much, scares everybody. Someone thinks, my God, one man on a wall, there goes the neighborhood! Got to be something under the carpet somewhere, something buried Crumley laughed. Buried is right. Arbuthnot? You think someone dug up some old really dirty scandal that nobody ever even heard of, and is threatening the studio, not very subtly, with releasing the dirt?
What kind of scandal, twenty years old, could make a studio think it was going to be destroyed if it was revealed?
If we wade in the sewer long enough well know. Trouble is, sewer-hopping was never my hobby. Was Arbuthnot, alive, clean?
Compared to other studio heads? Sure. He was single and had girlfriends, but you expect that of any bachelor, and they were all nice Santa Barbara horsewomen, Town and Country types, handsome and bright, showered twice a day. No dirt.
Crumley sighed again, as if someone had dealt him the wrong cards and he was ready to fold his hand and fade. What about that car crash Arbuthnot was in? Was it an accident?
I saw the news photos.
Photos, hell! Crumley looked out at his homemade jungle and checked the shadows. What if the accident wasnt an accident? What if it was, well, manslaughter. What if everyone was dead drunk and then dead?
They had just come from a big liquor bash at the studio. That much got in the papers.
Try this, mused Crumley. Studio bigwig, rich as Croesus, with all-time grosses for Maximus, out of his mind with hooch, playing chicken with the other car, driven by Sloane, ricochets off him and everyone hits the telephone pole. Thats not the kind of news you want front-paged.
Stock markets dive. Investors vanish. Films die. The silver-haired boy falls off his pedestal, et cetera, et cetera, so theres a coverup. Now, late in time, someone who was there, or uncovered the facts this year, is shaking down the studio, threatening to tell more than photos and skid-marks. Or what if?
What if?
It wasnt an accident and it wasnt horse-around drunkenness that slammed them to hell. What if someone did it to them on purpose?
Murder!? I said.
Why not? Studio heads that tall, that big, that wide, make lots of enemies. All the yes-men around them eventually think rat crap and malice. Who was next in line for power at Maximus that year?
Manny Leiber? But he wouldnt kill a fly. Hes all hot air!
Give him the benefit of one fly and one hot air balloon. Hes the studio head now, right? Well! A couple of slashed tires, some loosened bolts, and bang! the whole studio falls in your lap for a lifetime!
That all sounds logical.
But if we could find the guy that did it, hed prove it for us. Okay, buster, what next?
I suppose we check the old local newspapers from twenty years ago to see whats missing. And if you could kind of prowl around the studio. Unobtrusively, that is.
With these flat feet? I think I know the studio gate guard. Worked at
Metro years ago. Hed let me in and zip his lip. What else?
I gave him a list. The carpenters shop. The graveyard wall. And the Green Town house where Roy and I had planned to work, and where Roy might be now.
Roys still there, waiting to steal back his beasts. And, Crum, if what you say is true, night chicken rides, manslaughter, murder, we got to blow Roy out of there now. If the studio people go in Stage 13 tonight and find the box in which Roy hid that papier-mache body after he stole it, what wont they do to him?!
Crumley grunted. Youre asking me to not only get Roy re-hired but help him stay alive, right?
Dont say that!
Why not? Youre all over the ball field, playing pitcher and running to bat flies and fumble balls. How in hell do I catch Roy? Wander around the sets with a butterfly net and some cat food! Your studio friends know Roy, I dont. They can stomp him long before I get out of the bull pen. Give me just one fact to start with!
The Beast. If we found out who he is, we might find why Roy was fired for making that clay bust.
Yeah, yeah. What else? About the Beast
We saw him go into the graveyard. Roy followed him, but wouldnt tell me what he saw, what the Beast was up to. Maybe, maybe it was the Beast put that papier-mache duplicate of Arbuthnot up on the graveyard walland sent notes to blackmail people!
Now youre cooking! Crumley rubbed his bald head with both hands, rapidly. Identify the Beast, ask where he borrowed the ladder and how he made the look-alike Arbuthnot papier-mache corpse! Well! well! Crumley beamed.
He ran to the kitchen for more beer.
We drank and he gazed at me with paternal affection. I was just thinking how great it is to have you home.
I said, Hell, I havent even asked you about your novel Downwind from Death?
Thats not the title I gave you!
Your title was too good. Im giving it back. Downwind from Death will be published next week.
I leaped to grab Crumleys hands.
Crumb!! Oh, God! You did it! You got some champagne?! We both peered in his icebox.
If you churn beer and gin in a Waring blender, is that champagne? Why not try?
We tried.
And the phone rang.
Its for you, said Crumley.
Thank God! I grabbed the phone. Roy!
Roy said, I dont want to live. Oh, God, this is terrible. Get over here before I go mad. Stage 13!
And he was gone. Crumley! I said.
Crumley led me out to his car.
We rode across town. I couldnt get my teeth unclenched to speak. I held so hard to my knees that the circulation ran dead.
At the studio gate I told Crumley, Dont wait. Ill call in an hour and let you know
I walked away and bumped into the gate. I found a phone booth near Stage 13 and ordered a taxi to wait outside Stage 9, a good one hundred yards away. Then I walked through the doors of Stage 13.
I stepped into darkness and chaos.
I saw ten dozen things which were a devastation to my soul.
Nearby, the masks, skulls, jackstraw legbones, floating ribs, skull faces of the Phantom had been uprooted and hurled across the stage in frenzies.
Further over, a war, an annihilation, had just fallen in its own dusts. Roys spider towns and beetle cities were trodden into the earth. His
beasts had been eviscerated, decapitated, blasted, and buried in their own plastic flesh.
I advanced through ruins, scattered as if a night bombing had rained utter destruction upon the miniature roofs, turrets and Lilliputian figurines. Rome had been smashed by a gargantuan Attila. The great library at Alexandria was not burned; its tiny leaflet books, like the wings of hummingbirds, lay in drifts across the dunes. Paris smoldered. London was disemboweled. A giant Napoleon had stomped Moscow flat forever. In sum, five years work, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, had been wasted in, what? Five minutes!
Roy! I thought, you must never see this! But he had.
As I advanced across the lost battlefields and strewn villages I saw a shadow on the far wall.
It was a shadow from the motion picture The Phantom of the Opera when I was five. In that film some ballerinas, backstage, twirling, had frozen, stared, shrieked, and fled.
