Constance turned her face a frame at a time, like a stop-motion doll, taking about ten seconds to move frame by frame until she was looking right through me, with eyes adjusted to the wrong focus.
“When,” I said, “was the last time you took a gift of flowers to a marble sculpture? To a statue that never saw flowers, never saw you, but lived inside the marble, inside all that silence, when was the last time?”
A single tear dropped from Constance Rattigan’s right eye.
“I used to go every week. I was always hoping she’d just come up out of the water like an iceberg and melt. But finally I couldn’t stand the silence and not being thanked. She made me feel I was dead.”
Her head moved frame by frame back in the other direction toward a memory of last year or some year before.
“I think,”Crumley said,“it’s time for some more flowers. Yes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. How about …. Hollyhock House?”
Quickly, Constance Rattigan jumped up, glanced at the sea, sprinted for the surf, and dived in.
“Don’t!” I yelled.
For I was suddenly afraid. Even for fine swimmers the sea could take and not give back.
I ran to the surf-line and started to shuck off my shoes, when Constance, spraying water like a seal and shaking like a dog, exploded from the waves and trudged in. When she hit the hard, wet sand she stopped and threw up. It popped out of her mouth like a cork. She stood, hands on hips, looking down at the stuff on the surf-line as the tide drifted it away.
“I’ll be damned,” she said, curiously. “That hairball must’ve been in there all those years!”
She turned to look me up and down, the color coming back into her cheeks. She flicked her fingers at me, tossing sea-rain on my face, as if to freshen me.
“Does swimming,” I pointed at the ocean, “always make you well?”
“The day it doesn’t I’ll never come out again,” she said quietly. “A quick swim, a quick lay works. I can’t help Arbuthnot or Sloane, they’re rotten dead. Or Emily Wickes—”
She froze, then changed the name, “Emily Sloane.”
“Is Wickes her new name, for twenty years, at Hollyhock House?” Crumley asked.
“With my hairball out, I need some champagne in. C’mon.”
She opened a bottle by her blue-tiled pool and poured our glasses full.
“You going to be fool enough to try to save Emily Wickes Sloane, alive or dead, this late in time?”
“Who’ll stop us?” said Crumley.
“The whole studio! No, maybe three people who know she’s there. You’ll need introductions.No one gets in Hollyhock House without Constance Rattigan. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll help.”
Crumley drank his champagne and said: “One last thing. Who took charge that night, twenty years ago. It must have been bad. Who—”
“Directed it? It had to be directed, sure. People were running over each other, screaming. It was Crime and Punishment, War and Peace. Someone had to yell: Not this way, that! In the middle of the night with all the screams and blood, thank God, he saved the scene, the actors, the studio, all with no film in his camera. The greatest living German director.”
“Fritz Wong!?” I exploded.
“Fritz,” said Constance Rattigan, “Wong.”
65
Fritz’s eyrie, halfway up from the Beverly Hills Hotel toward Mulholland, had a view of some ten million lights on the vast floor of Los Angeles. From a long elegant marble porch fronting his villa, you could watch the jets fifteen miles away coming in to land, bright torches, slow meteors in the sky, one every minute.
Fritz Wong yanked his house door wide and blinked out, pretending not to see me.