Let's All Kill Constance (11 page)

"That's better. Rattigan, these names, was she crazy wild? Was she ever honest-to-God sane?"

"Offshore. I heard her swimming way out with the seals, barking, a free soul."

"Maybe she should have stayed out there."

"Herman Melville," I muttered.

"Say again?"

"Took me years to finish
Moby-Dick.
Melville should have stayed at sea with Jack, his loving friend. Land? When he lived there, it tore his soul from his heart. Onshore, he aged thirty years, in a customs shed, half-dead."

"Poor son of a bitch," whispered Henry.

"Poor son of a bitch," I echoed quietly.

"And Rattigan? You think she should've stayed offshore, not in her fancy beach place?"

"It was big, bright, white, and lovely, but a tomb full of ghosts, like those films upstairs forty feet tall, fifty years wide, like these mirrors here, and one woman hating them all for unknown reasons."

"Poor son of a bitch," murmured Henry.

"Poor bitch," I said.

"LET'S see some more," said Henry. "Switch on the lights so I won't need my cane."

"Can you feel if lights are on or off?"

"Silly child. Read me the names!"

I took his arm and we moved along the mirrors as I read the names.

"The dates under the names," Henry commanded. "They getting closer to
now?"

1935. 1937. 1939. 1950. 1955.

And with names, names, names to go with them, all different.

"One too many," said Henry. "We done?"

"One last mirror and date.  October thirty-first.  Last year.”

"How come everything happens to you on Halloween?"

"Fate and providence love wimps like me."

"You say the date, but..." Henry touched the cold glass. "No name?"

"None."

"She going to come
add
a name? Going to show up making noises just a dog hears, and no light down here. She—"

"Shut up, Henry." I stared along the mirrors in the cellar night where shadow-phantoms ran.

"Son." Henry took my arm. "Let's git."

"One last thing." I took a dozen steps and stopped.

"Don't tell me." Henry inhaled. "You're fresh out of floor."

I looked down at a round manhole. The darkness sank deep with no end.

"Sounds empty." Henry inhaled. "A freshwater
storm drain!
"

"Beneath the back of the theater, yes."

"Damn!"

For suddenly a flood of water gushed below, a clean tide smelling of green hills and cool air.

"It rained a few hours ago. Takes an hour for the runoff to get here. Most of the year the storm drain's dry. Now it'll run a foot deep, all the way to the ocean."

I bent to feel the inside of the hole. Rungs.

Henry guessed. "You're
not
climbing down?"

"It's dark and cold and a long way to the sea, and if you're careless, drowning."

Henry sniffed.

"You figure she came up this way to check those names?"

"Or came in through the theater and climbed down."

"Hey!
More
water!"

A gust of wind, very cold, sighed up out of the hole.

"Jesus Christ!" I yelled.

"What?"

I stared. "I
saw
something!"

"If you didn't,
I
did!" The flashlight beam arced crazily around the mirrored room as Henry grabbed my elbow and lurched away from the hole.

"We going the right way?"

"Christ," I said. "I
hope so!"

OUR taxi dropped us at the curb behind Rattigan's big white Arabian fortress.

"Lordy," said Henry, and added, "That meter ran overtime. From now on,
I'm
driving."

Crumley was not out front by the shoreline but farther up by the pool with half a dozen full martini glasses, two already empty. He gazed at these fondly and explained.

"I'm ready now for your numbskull routines. I am
fortified.
Hello, Henry. Henry, aren't you sorry you left New Orleans for this can-o'-worms factory?"

"One of those drinks smells like vodka, right?
That
will make me not sorry."

I handed a glass to Henry and took one for myself in haste while Crumley scowled at my silence.

"Okay, spill it," he said.

I told him about Grauman's and the basement dressing-room mirrors. "Plus," I said, "I been making lists."

"Hold it. You've sobered me up," said Crumley. "Let me kill another." He lifted a glass in mock salute. "Okay, read your lists."

"The grocery boy on Mount Lowe. The neighbors of Queen Califia in Bunker Hill. Father Rattigan's secretary. The film projectionist on high in Grauman's Chinese."

Henry cut in. "That gent in Grauman's . . . ?"

I described Rustler, stashed among stacks of old film with the pictures on the walls of all the sad women with all the lost names.

Henry mused. "Hey now. Did you make a list of those ladies in the pictures up on high?"

I read off my pad: "Mabel. Helen. Marilee. Annabel. Hazel. Betty Lou. Clara. Pollyanna ..."

Crumley sat up straight.

"You got a list of those names on the cellar mirrors?"

I shook my head. "It was
dark
down there."

"Easy as pie." Henry tapped his head. "Hazel. Annabel. Grace. Pollyanna. Helen. Marilee. Betty Lou. Detect the similarities?"

As the names rolled from Henry's mouth, I ticked them off my penciled list. A perfect match.

At which point there was a lightning strike. The lights failed. We could hear the surf roar in to salt Rattigan's beach as pale moonlight silvered the shore. Thunder clamored. It gave me time to think and say, "Rattigan's got a complete run of Academy annuals with all the pictures, ages, roles.

Her competition is in every one. It ties in with all those upstairs pictures, downstairs mirrors, right?"

Thunder echoed, the lights blinked back on.

We went inside and got out the Academy books.

"Look for the mirror names," Henry advised.

"I know, I know," Crumley growled.

In half an hour we had thirty years of Academy annuals paper-clipped.

"Ethel, Carlotta, Suzanne, Clara, Helen," I read.

"Constance can't hate them all."

"Chances are," said Henry. "What else she got in her bookshelves?"

An hour later we found some actors' reference albums, crammed with pictures, going way back. One with a legend up front giving the name J. Wallington Bradford. I read, "A.k.a. Tallullah Two, a.k.a. Swanson, Gloria in Excelsius, a.k.a. Funny Face."

A quiet bell sounded in the back of my head.

I opened another album and read: "Alberto Quickly. Fast flimflammery. Plays all parts
Great Expectations.
Acts
A Christinas Carol, Christmas Carol's
Scrooge, Marley, Three Christmases, Fezziwig.
Saint Joan,
unburned. Alberto Quickly.
Quick Change.
Born: 1895. At liberty." The quiet bell sounded again.

"Hold on," I said. I felt myself murmuring. "Pictures, mirrors, and now here's a guy, Bradford, who is
all
women. And then here's another guy, Quickly, who is all men, every man." The bell faded. "Did Constance know them?"

Like a sleepwalker I moved to pick up Constance's Book of the Dead.

There it was.

Bradford on one page, near the beginning of the book.

Quickly toward the end.

"But no red circles around the names. So? Are they alive or dead?"

"Why not go see," said Henry.

Lightning struck. The lights failed again.

In the dark, Henry said, "Don't tell me, let me guess."

CRUMLEY dropped us by the old apartment house and ran.

"Now," said Henry, "what are we doing here?"

Inside, I glanced up the three-story stairwell. "Searching for Marlene Dietrich alive and well."

Before I even knocked on the door, I caught the perfume through the paneling. I sneezed and knocked.

"Dear God," a voice said. "I haven't a thing to wear."

The door opened and a billowing butterfly kimono stood there with a Victorian relic inside, squirming to make it fit. It stopped squirming and tape-measured my shoes, my knee bones, my shoulders, and finally eye to eye.

"J. Wallington Bradford?" I cleared my throat. "Mr. Bradford?"

"Who's asking?" the creature in the doorway wondered. "Jesus. Come in. Come in. And who's this other thing?"

"I'm the boy's Seeing Eye." Henry probed the air. "That a chair? Think I'll sit. Sure smells strong in here. Nothing personal."

The kimono let loose a blizzard of confetti in its lungs and waved us in with a grand sweep of its sleeve. "I hope it isn't business that brings you here. Sit, while Mama pours gin. Big or small?"

Before I could speak he had filled a big glass with clear Bombay blue crystal liquor. I sipped.

"That's a good boy," said Bradford. "You staying five minutes or the night? My God, he's blushing. Is this about Rattigan?"

"Rattigan!" I cried. "How'd you know?"

"She was here and gone. Every few years Rattigan vanishes. It's how she divorces a new husband, an old lover, God, or her astrologer.
¿Quien sabe?"

I nodded, stunned.

"She came years ago, asking how I did it. All those people, she said. Constance, I said, how many cat lives have
you
had? A thousand? Don't ask which flue I slid up, which bed I ran under!"

"But—"

"No buts. Mother Earth knows all. Constance invented Freud, tossed in Jung and Darwin. Did you know she bedded all six studio heads? It was a bet she took at the Brown Derby from Harry Cohn. Til harvest Jack Warner and his brothers till their ears fly off,' she said.

"All in the
same year?
Cohn yelled.

"'Year, hell,' said Constance. 'In one week, with Sunday off!'

" 'I bet a hundred you can't!' said Cohn.

" 'Make it a thousand and you're on,' said Constance.

"Harry Cohn glared. 'What will you put up as collateral?'

" 'Me,' said Rattigan.

" 'Shake!' cried Cohn.

"She shook all over. 'Hold these!' She flung her pants in Cohn's lap and fled."

Breathless, J. W. Bradford raved on: "Did you know that once I was Judy Garland. Then Joan Crawford, then Bette Davis. I was Bankhead in
Lifeboat.
A real nightwalker, late sleeper, bed buster. You need help finding Rattigan? I can list her discards. Some fell in my lap. You want to
say
something?"

"Is there a
real you
in there, somewhere?" I said.

"God, I hope not. How terrible to find me in bed with just me! Rattigan. You tried her beach house? Artie Shaw stayed there after Caruso. She got
him
when she was thirteen. Drove him up the La Scala wall. When she topped off Lawrence Tibbett, he sang soprano. They had a squad car of paramedics by her joint, 1936, when she mouth-to-mouth breathed Thalberg into Forest Lawn. You okay?"

"I just got hit by a ten-ton safe."

"Take more gin. Tallulah says so."

"You'll help us find Constance?"

"No one else can. I loaned her my whole wardrobe a million years back. Gave her my makeup-box rejects, taught her perfumes, how to surprise her eyebrows, lift her ears, shorten her upper lip, widen her smile, flatten or bulge her bosom, walk taller than tall, or fall short. I was a mirror she posed in front of, watching me stare, blink, pretend remorse, alert, despair, delight, sing in a gilded cage, power-dive into pajamas, breaststroke out. She trotted in a high school pony, swarmed out a nest of ballerinas. By the time she left, she was someone else. That was ten thousand vaudevilles ago. And all so she could compete with other actresses for other roles in films, or maybe steal their men.

"Okay, doll," J. W. Bradford said as he scribbled on a pad. "Here's more names of those who loved Constance. Nine producers, ten directors, forty-five at-liberty actors, and a partridge in a pear tree."

"Did she never hold still?"

"Ever see those seals in Rattigan's surf? Slick as oil, quicker than quicksilver, hit the bed like lightning. Number one in the L.A. Marathon long before there was one. Could have been board chairman at three studios, but wound up as Vampira, Madame Defarge, and Dolley Madison. There!"

"Thanks." I scanned a list that would have filled the Bastille twice over.

"Now if you'll forgive, Mata Hari must
change.
¹
"

Zip! He flourished his kimono.

Zip! I grabbed Henry's arm and we flew down the stairs and out onto the street.