A Graveyard for Lunatics (Crumley Mysteries 2)

But if the studio doctor heard, it was not evident.

He lingered, studying the room with distaste, fearful of encounters. He resembled one of those lizards you see on the edge of a primeval forest, glinting his eyes around, terribly apprehensive, sniffing the air, touching the wind with probing claws, lashing his tail in little twitches, doom in all directions, no hope, only nervous response, ready to spin, rustle, run. His gaze found Roy and for some reason fixed on him. Roy sat up, stiffened, and smiled a weak smile at the doc.

My God, I thought, someone saw Roy stealing off with his box. Someone—

“Will you say grace?” called Fritz. “The Surgeon’s Prayer— O Lord, deliver us from doctors!”

Doc Phillips glanced away as if only a fly had touched his skin. Roy collapsed back in his chair.

The doc had come, out of habit. Beyond the commissary, out there in the bright high-noon sun, Manny and a few other fleas were doing backflips of anger and frustration. And the doc had come here to get away from it or search for suspects, I could not tell which.

But there he was, Doc Phillips, the fabulous physician to all the studios from the early handcranked cameras to the advent of shrieks and screams in sound to this very noon when the earth shook. If Groc was the eternal jolly Punch, then Doc Phillips was the glum curer of incurable egos, a shadow on the wall, a terrible scowl at the back of theatre previews, diagnosing sick films. He was like those football coaches on the sidelines of victorious teams, refusing to flash their teeth just once in approval. He spoke not in paragraphs or sentences, but clips and chops of shorthand prescription words. Between his ayes and nays lay silence.

He had been on the eighteenth green when the head of Skylark Studios sank his last putt and dropped dead. It was rumored he had sailed off the California coast when that famous publisher threw an equally famous director overboard to “accidentally” drown. I had seen pictures of him at Valentino’s bier, in Jeanne Eagels’s sickroom, at some San Diego yacht race where he was carried as sunstroke protection to a dozen New York movie moguls. It was said he had happy-drugged a whole studio star system and then cured them in his hideaway asylum somewhere in Arizona, near Needles. The irony of the town’s name did not go unsaid. He rarely ate in the commissary; his glance spoiled the food. Dogs barked at him as if he were an infernal mailman. Babies bit his elbows and suffered stomach cramps.

Everyone flinched and pulled back at his arrival.

Doc Phillips fastened his glare here and there along our group. Within instants, some few of them developed tics.

Fritz turned to me. “His work is never done. Too many babies arrived early behind Stage 5. Heart attacks at the New York office. Or that actor in Monaco gets caught with his crazy operatic boyfriend. He—”

The dyspeptic doctor strode behind our chairs, whispered to Stanislau Groc, then turned quickly and hurried out.

Fritz scowled at the far exit and then turned to burn me with his monocle.

“Oh master futurist who sees all, tell us, what the hell is going on?”

The blood burned in my cheeks. My tongue was locked with guilt in my mouth. I lowered my head.

“Musical chairs,” someone shouted. Groc, on his feet, said again, his eyes on me, “Chairs. Chairs!”

Everyone laughed. Everyone moved, which covered my confusion.

When they had done with churning in all directions, I found Stanislau Groc, the man who had polished Lenin’s brow and dressed his goatee for eternity, directly across from me, and Roy at my side.

Groc smiled a great smile, the friend of a lifetime.

I said, “What was Doc’s hurry? What’s going on?”

“Pay no attention.”Groc calmly eyed the commissary doors. “I felt a shudder at eleven this morning, as if the rear of the studio had struck an iceberg. Madmen have been rushing around ever since, bailing out. It makes me happy to see so many people upset. It makes me forget my melancholy job of turning Bronx mud ducks into Brooklyn swans.” He stopped for a bite of his fruit salad. “What do you guess? What iceberg has our dear Titanic struck?”

Roy leaned back in his chair and said, “There’s some calamity at the prop and carpenters’ shop.”

I shot Roy a scowl. Stanislau Groc stiffened.

“Ah, yes,” he said slowly. “A small problem with the manatee, the woman’s figure, carved from wood, to go on the Bounty.”

I kicked Roy under the table, but he leaned forward:

“Surely that wasn’t the iceberg you mentioned?”

“Ah, no,” said Groc, laughing. “Not an Arctic collision but a hot-air balloon race, all the gas-bag producers and yes-men of the studio are being called into Manny’s office. Someone will be fired. And then—” Groc gestured toward the ceiling with his tiny doll hands—“falling upward!”

“What?”

“A man is fired from Warner’s and falls upward to MGM. A man at MGM is fired and falls upward to 20th. Falling upward! Isaac Newton’s reverse law!” Groc paused to smile at his own wit. “Ah, but you, poor writer, will never be able, when fired, to fall upward, only down. I—”

He stopped, because …