I walked blindly into a wall and groped along an empty street, thanking God for emptiness, until I found what I thought was a phone booth and took two minutes searching my pockets for a nickel that was there all the time. I shoved it in the slot, dialed.
It was while I was dialing Crumley, that the men with the brooms showed up. There were two studio vans and an old beat-up Lincoln that swept by on their way to Beachwood Avenue. They turned at the corner leading around to Clarence’s apartment. Even the sight of them made me squeeze-sink accordion-wise in the booth. The man in the beat-up Lincoln could have been Doc Phillips, but I was so busy hiding, sinking to my knees, I couldn’t tell.
“Let me guess,” said Crumley’s voice on the line. “Someone really die?”
“How’d you know?”
“Calm down. When I come there will it be too late, all the evidence destroyed? Where are you?” I told him. “There’s an Irish pub down the way. Go sit. I don’t want you out in the open if things are as bad as you say. You okay?”
“I’m dying.”
“Don’t! Without you, how would I fill my days?”
Half an hour later Crumley found me half inside the Irish pub front door and regarded me with that look of deep despair and paternal affection that came and went across his face like clouds on a summer landscape.
“Well,” he grouched, “where’s the body?”
At the bungalow court we found the door to Clarence’s bungalow ajar, as if someone had left it unlocked on purpose.
We pushed.
And stood in the middle of Clarence’s apartment.
But it was not empty, eviscerated the way Roy’s place had been.
All the books were in their cases, the floor clean, no torn letters. Even the framed pictures, most of them, were back on their walls.
“Okay,” sighed Crumley. “Where’s all the junk you said?”
“Wait.”
I opened one drawer of a four-layer file. There were photos, battered and torn, crammed in place.
I opened six files to show Crumley I hadn’t been dreaming.
The stomped-on letters had been stuffed in each one.
There was only one thing missing.
Clarence.
Crumley eyed me.
“Don’t!” I said. “He lay right where you’re standing.”
Crumley stepped over the invisible body. He went through the other files, as I had done, to see the torn cards, the hammered and bludgeoned photos, stashed out of sight. He let out a great heavy-anvil sigh and shook his head.
“Someday,” he said, “you’ll blunder into something that makes sense. There
’s no body, so what can I do? How do we know he hasn’t gone on vacation?”
“He’ll never come back.”
“Who says? You want to go to the nearest station and file a complaint? They’ll come look at the torn stuff in the files, shrug, say one less nut off the old Hollywood tree, tell the landlord and—”
“The landlord?” said a voice behind us.
An old man stood in the door.