“I’m heading downtown to the newspaper morgue. There must be something there on Arbuthnot and 1934 we don’t know. You want me to search for Clarence, on the way?”
“Oh, Crum,” I said, turning. “You know and I know, by now they’ve burned him to ashes and burned the ashes. And how do we get in to shake down the clinkers in the backlot incinerator? I’m on my way to the Garden of Gethsemane.”
“Is that safe?”
“Safer than Calvary.”
“Stay there. Call me.”
“You’ll hear me, across town,” I said, “without a phone.”
47
But first, I stopped at Calvary.
The three crosses were empty.
“J. C.,” I whispered, touching his picture folded in my pocket, and realized suddenly that a rich presence had been following me for some time.
I looked around as Manny’s mob of fog, his gray-shadow Chinese-funeral Rolls-Royce, crept up behind me. I heard the back door suck its rubber gums as the soundless door exhaled wide, letting out a cool burst of refrigerated air. Not much larger than an Eskimo Pie, Manny Leiber peered out from his elegant icebox. “Hey, you,” he said.
It was a hot day. I leaned into the refrigerated Rolls-Royce cubby and refreshed my face while I improved my mind.
“I got news for you.” I could see Manny’s breath on the artificial winter air. “We’re shutting down the studio for two days. General cleanup. Repainting. Crash job.”
“How can you do that? The expense—”
“Everyone will be paid full time. Should’ve been done years ago. So we shut down—”
For what? I thought. To get everyone off the lot. Because they know or suspect Roy is still alive, and someone has told them to find and kill him?
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” I said.
I had found that insult was the best answer. Nobody suspected you of anything if you, in turn, were dumb enough to insult.
“Whose idea was this dumb idea?” I said.
“Whatta you mean?” cried Manny, pulling back into his refrigerator. His breath steamed in jets of frost on the air. “Mine!”
“You’re not that dumb,” I pursued. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that. You care about money too much. Someone had to order you to do that. Someone above you?”
“There’s no one above me!” But his eyes slid, while his mouth equivocated.
“You take full credit for all this, that’ll cost maybe half a million in one week?”
“Well,” Manny flinched.
“It’s gotta be New York.” I let him off. “Those dwarfs on the telephone from Manhattan. Crazed monkeys. You’re only two days away from finishing Caesar and Christ. What if J. C. goes on another binge while you’re repainting the stages—?”
“That charcoal pit was his last scene. We’re writing him out of our Bible. You are. And another thing, as soon as the studio reopens, you go back on The Dead Ride Fast.”
His words breathed out to chill my face. The chill spread down my back.
“Can’t be done without Roy Holdstrom.” I decided to play it even more blunt and naïve. “And Roy’s dead.”
“What?” Manny leaned forward, fought for control, then squinted at me. “Why do you say that?”
“He committed suicide,” I said.