A Graveyard for Lunatics (Crumley Mysteries 2)

“There was no March of Time in 1930,” I said.

“Bull’s-eye! The boy’s an expert!”

“Those are not Time reels,” I added. “It’s a cover. For what?”

“My own home movies, shot with my eight-millimeter camera, blown up to thirty-five millimeters, and hid behind March of Time titles.”

I tried not to lean forward too quickly. “You got a whole film history of this studio then?”

“In 1923, 1927, 1930, name it! F. Scott Fitzgerald, drunk in the commissary. G. B. Shaw the day he commandeered the place. Lon Chaney in the makeup building the night he showed the Westmore brothers how to change faces! Dead a month later. Wonderful warm man. William Faulkner, a drunk but polite sad screenwriter, poor s.o.b. Old films. Old history. Pick!”

My eyes roved and stopped. I heard the air jet from my nostrils.

October 15, 1934. Two weeks before Arbuthnot, the head of the studio, was killed.

“That.”

Maggie hesitated, pulled it out, shoved the film i

nto the Moviola, and cranked the machine.

We were looking at the front entrance of Maximus Films on an October afternoon in 1934. The doors were shut, but you could see shadows inside the glass. And then the doors opened and two or three people stepped out. In the middle was a tall, burly man, laughing, eyes shut, head back to the sky, shoulders quivering with his merriment. His eyes were slits, he was so happy. He was taking a deep breath, almost his last, of life.

“You know him?” asked Maggie.

I peered down into this small half-dark, half-lit cave in the earth.

“Arbuthnot.”

I touched the glass as one touches a crystal ball, reading no future, only pasts with the color leached out.

“Arbuthnot. Dead, the same month you shot this film.”

Maggie cranked backward and started over. The three men came out laughing again and Arbuthnot wound up grimacing into her camera on that long-forgotten and incredibly happy noon.

Maggie saw something in my face. “Well? Spit it out.”

“I saw him this week,” I said.

“Bosh. You been smoking those funny cigars?”

Maggie moved three more frames through. Arbuthnot raised his head higher into an almost raining sky.

And now Arbuthnot was calling and waving to someone out of sight.

I took a chance. “In the graveyard, on Halloween night, there was a wire-frame papier-mâché scarecrow with his face.”

Now Arbuthnot’s Duesenberg was at the curb. He shook hands with Manny and Groc, promising them happy years. Maggie did not look at me, but only at the dark-light dark-light pictures jumping rope below.

“Don’t believe anything on Halloween night.”

“Some other people saw. Some ran scared. Manny and others have been walking on land mines for days.”

“Bosh, again,” Maggie snorted. “What else is new? You may have noticed I stay in the projection room or up here where the air’s so thin they get nosebleeds climbing up. That’s why I like loony Fritz. He shoots until midnight, I edit until dawn. Then we hibernate. When the long winter ends each day at five, we rise, timing ourselves to the sunset. One or two days a week, you will also have noticed, we make our pilgrimage to the commissary lunch to prove to Manny Leiber we’re alive.”

“Does he really run the studio?”

“Who else?”