“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.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No, dammit.” He softened his voice. “Yeah, hell. But I sure wish you’d 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 didn’t lead somewhere? What’s the use of a panic if you don’t 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 didn’t spill the beans. Someone else did. I bet there’s 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, you’ve still got a studio rich as hell.”
“Any big problems, recently, ruckuses, upheavals, troubles? You know, any other people fired, films canceled?”
“It’s 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, doesn’t 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 we’ll 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 wasn’t 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. That’s 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 there’s 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 wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t 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 wouldn’t kill a fly. He’s all hot air!”
“Give him the benefit of one fly and one hot air balloon. He’s 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.”