We found Constance Rattigan on the beach. It was the first time I had ever seen her lying on the sand. Always before she was in her pool or in the sea. Now she lay between, as if she had no strength to go in the water or back to her house. She was so beached, stranded, and pale it hurt me to see.
We crouched down on the sand beside her and waited for her to feel us there, eyes shut.
Youve been lying, Crumley said.
Her eyeballs revolved under her lids. Which lie do you mean? About your running away in the midst of that midnight party, twenty
years ago. You know you stayed until the very end.
What did I do? She turned her head away. We could not see if she was looking out at the gray sea, where an early-afternoon fog was rolling in to spoil the hour.
They brought you to the scene of the accident. A friend of yours needed help.
I never had any friends.
Come on, Constance, said Crumley, Ive got the facts. Ive been collecting facts. Newspapers say there were three funerals on the same day. Father Kelly, over at that church near where the accident really happened, says Emily Sloane died after the funerals. What if I got a court order to break into the Sloanes tomb? Would there be one body there or two? One, I think, and Emily gone where? And who took her? You? On whose orders?
Constance Rattigans body trembled. I could not tell if it was some old
grief suddenly surfaced in shock, or just the mist now moving around us. For a dumb dick, youre pretty smart, she said.
No, just some days I fall in a nest of eggs and dont break one. Father Kelly told our screenwriter friend here that Emilys mind was gone. So she had to be led. Were you in charge?
God help me, whispered Constance Rattigan. A wave fell on the shore. A thicker fog reached the surf-line. Yes
Crumley nodded quietly and said: There must have been a big, a terrible, God knows, a huge coverup, on the spot. Did someone stuff the poorbox? I mean, did the studio promise to, hell, I dont know, redecorate the altar, finance widows and orphans forever? Hand the priest an impossible fortune every week if he forgot that you walked Emily Sloane out of there?
That murmured Constance, eyes wide, sitting up now, searching the horizonwas part of it.
And more money in the poorbox, and more and more, if the priest said the accident happened not in front of his church but down the street maybe a hundred yards, so he didnt see Arbuthnot ram the other car, kill his enemy, or his enemys wife gone mad at their deaths. Yes?
That murmured Constance Rattigan, in another year, almost does it. And did you lead Emily Sloane out of the church an hour later, and,
good as dead, did you lead her across an empty lot full of sunflowers and FOR SALE signs
Everything was so close, so convenient, it was a laugh, remembered Constance, not laughing, her face gray. The graveyard, the undertaking parlor, the church for some quick funerals, the empty lot, the path, and Emily? Hell. She had gone ahead, in her mind, anyway. All I had to do was steer.
And, Constance, Crumley said, is Emily Sloane alive today?
Constance turned her face a frame at a time, like a stop-motion doll, taking about ten seconds to move frame by frame until she was looking right through me, with eyes adjusted to the wrong focus.
When, I said, was the last time you took a gift of flowers to a marble sculpture? To a statue that never saw flowers, never saw you, but lived inside the marble, inside all that silence, when was the last time?
A single tear dropped from Constance Rattigans right eye.
I used to go every week. I was always hoping shed just come up out of the water like an iceberg and melt. But finally I couldnt stand the silence and not being thanked. She made me feel I was dead.
Her head moved frame by frame back in the other direction toward a memory of last year or some year before.
I think, Crumley said, its time for some more flowers. Yes? I dont know.
Yes, you do. How about Hollyhock House?
Quickly, Constance Rattigan jumped up, glanced at the sea, sprinted for the surf, and dived in.
Dont! I yelled.
For I was suddenly afraid. Even for fine swimmers the sea could take and not give back.
I ran to the surf-line and started to shuck off my shoes, when Constance, spraying water like a seal and shaking like a dog, exploded from the waves and trudged in. When she hit the hard, wet sand she stopped and threw up. It popped out of her mouth like a cork. She stood, hands on hips, looking down at the stuff on the surf-line as the tide drifted it away.
Ill be damned, she said, curiously. That hairball mustve been in there all those years!
She turned to look me up and down, the color coming back into her
cheeks. She flicked her fingers at me, tossing sea-rain on my face, as if to freshen me.
Does swimming, I pointed at the ocean, always make you well? The day it doesnt Ill never come out again, she said quietly. A quick
swim, a quick lay works. I cant help Arbuthnot or Sloane, theyre rotten dead. Or Emily Wickes
She froze, then changed the name, Emily Sloane.
Is Wickes her new name, for twenty years, at Hollyhock House? Crumley asked.
With my hairball out, I need some champagne in. Cmon.
She opened a bottle by her blue-tiled pool and poured our glasses full. You going to be fool enough to try to save Emily Wickes t Sloane, alive
or dead, this late in time?
Wholl stop us? said Crumley.
The whole studio! No, maybe three people who know shes there. Youll need introductions. No one gets in Hollyhock House without Constance Rattigan. Dont look at me that way. Ill help.
Crumley drank his champagne and said: One last thing. Who took charge that night, twenty years ago. It must have been bad. Who Directed it? It had to be directed, sure. People were running over each other, screaming. It was Crime and Punishment, War and Peace. Someone had to yell: Not this way, thatl In the middle of the night with all the screams and blood, thank God, he saved the scene, the actors, the studio, all with no film in his camera. The greatest living German director.
Fritz Wong!? I exploded.
Fritz, said Constance Rattigan, Wong.
Fritzs eyrie, halfway up from the Beverly Hills Hotel toward Mulholland, had a view of some ten million lights on the vast floor of Los Angeles. From a long elegant marble porch fronting his villa, you could watch the jets fifteen miles away coming in to land, bright torches, slow meteors in the sky, one every minute.
Fritz Wong yanked his house door wide and blinked out, pretending not to see me.
I handed over his monocle from my pocket. He seized and slotted it. Arrogant son of a bitch. The monocle flashed from his right eye like a guillotine blade. So! Its you! The coming-great arrives to bug the soon-vanishing. The ascendant king knocks up the has-been prince. The writer who tells the lions what to say to Daniel visits the tamer who tells them what to do. What are you doing here? The film is kaput!
Here are the pages. I walked in. Maggie? you okay?
Maggie, in a far corner of the parlor, nodded, pale, but, I could see, recovered.
Ignore Fritz, she said. Hes full of codswallop and liver-wurst.
Go sit with the Slasher and shut up, said Fritz, letting his monocle burn holes in my pages.
Yes I looked at Hitlers picture on the wall and clicked my heelssir! Fritz glanced up, angrily. Stupid! That picture of the maniac housepainter is there to remind me of the big bastards I ran from so as to arrive at little ones. Dear God, the facade of Maximus Films is a clone of the Brandenburg Gate! Sitzfleisch, down!
I downed my Sitzfleisch and gaped.
For just beyond Maggie Botwin was the most incredible religious shrine I had ever seen. It was brighter, bigger, more beauteous than the silver and gold altar at St. Sebastians.
Fritz, I exclaimed.
For this dazzling shrine was shelved with creme de menthes, brandies, whiskeys, cognacs, ports, Burgundies and Bordeaus, stored in layers of crystal and bright glass tubing. It gleamed like an undersea grotto from which schools of luminous bottles might swarm. Above and around it hung scores and hundreds of fine Swedish cut crystal, Lalique, and Waterford. It was a celebratory throne, the birthing place of Louis the Fourteenth, an Egyptian Sun Kings tomb, Napoleons Empiric Coronation dais. It was a toyshop window at midnight on Christmas Eve. It was
As you know, I said, I rarely drink
Fritzs monocle fell. He caught and replanted it. What will you have? he barked.
I avoided his contempt by remembering a wine I had heard him mention. Gorton, I said, 38.
Do you really expect me to open my best wine for someone like you? I swallowed hard and nodded.
He hauled off and swung his fist toward the ceiling as if to pound me into the floor. Then the fist came down, delicately, and opened a lid on a cabinet to pull out a bottle.
Gorton, 1938.
He worked the corkscrew, gritting his teeth and eying me. I shall watch every sip, he growled. If you betray, by the
