The graveyard day watchman, a man long in years and deep in suspicion, with a face not unlike a weathered tombstone, glanced toward the gate.
A woman, bearing flowers, was coming up the road, far out, near Santa Monica Boulevard.
Thank God, I thought.
The watchman snorted, chewed his gums, wheeled about, and strode off among the graves. Just in time, for the woman had stopped and headed off, away from us.
We jumped up. Roy grabbed some flowers off a nearby mound.
“Don’t!”
“Like hell!” Roy stashed the flowers on Grandpa Smythe’s stone. “Just in case that guy comes back and wonders why there’re no flowers after all our gab. Come on!”
We moved out about fifty yards and waited, pretending to talk, but saying little. Finally, Roy touched my elbow. “Careful,” he whispered. “Side glances. Don’t look straight on. He’s back.”
And indeed the old watchman had arrived at the place near the wall where the long impressions of the fallen body still remained.
He looked up and saw us. Quickly, I put my arm around Roy’s shoulder to ease his sadness.
Now the old man bent. With raking fingers, he combed the grass. Soon there was no trace of anything heavy that might have fallen from the sky last night, in a terrible rain.
“You believe now?” I said.
“I wonder,” said Roy, “where that hearse went to.”
9
As we were driving back in through the main gate of the studio, the hearse whispered out. Empty. Like a long autumn wind it drifted off, around, and back to Death’s country.
“Jesus Christ! Just like I guessed!” Roy steered but stared back at the empty street. “I’m beginning to enjoy this!”
We moved along the street in the direction from which the hearse had been coming.
Fritz Wong marched across the alley in front of us, driving or leading an invisible military squad, muttering and swearing to himself, his sharp profile cutting the air in two halves, wearing a dark beret, the only man in Hollywood who wore a beret and dared anyone to notice!
“Fritz!” I called. “Stop, Roy!”
Fritz ambled over to lean against the car and give us his by now familiar greeting.
“Hello, you stupid bike-riding Martian! Who’s that strange-looking ape driving?”
“Hello, Fritz, you stupid …” I faltered and then said sheepishly, “Roy Holdstrom, world’s greatest inventor, builder, and flier of dinosaurs!”
Fritz Wong’s monocle flashed fire. He fixed Roy with his Oriental-Germanic glare, then nodded crisply.
“Any friend of Pithecanthropus erectus is a friend of mine!”
Roy grabbed his handshake. “I liked your last film.”
“Liked!” cried Fritz Wong.
“Loved!”
“Good.” Fritz looked at me. “What’s new since breakfast!”
“Anything funny happening around here just now?”
“A Roman phalanx of forty men just marched that way. A gorilla, carrying his head, ran in Stage 10. A homosexual art director got thrown out of the Men’s. Judas is on strike for more silver over in Galilee. No, no. I wouldn’t say anything funny or I’d notice.”