“Don’t take any more confessions tonight!”
“You giving orders?”
“Father, you’re alive! I mean, well, is there anything we can do to protect you, or—”
“No, no!” the voice cried. “Go to that other heathen church! That Jack and the Beanstalk place!”
The telephone slammed.
I looked at Crumley, he looked at me.
“Look under Grauman’s,” I said.
Crumley looked. “Chinese, yeah. And Grauman’s name. And a red circle and
a crucifix. But he died years ago!”
“Yeah, but part of Constance is buried there, or written there in cement. I’ll show you. Last chance to see Jack and the Beanstalk?”
“If we time it,” said Crumley, “the film will be over.”
Chapter Nineteen
We didn’t have to time it right.
When Crumley dropped me in front of the Other Church, the great loud boisterous romantic tearstained celluloid cathedral … There was a sign on the red Chinese front door, CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS, and some workmen moving in and out. A few people were in the forecourt, fitting their shoes in the footprints.
Crumley dropped me and vamoosed.
I turned to look at the great pagoda facade. Ten percent Chinese, ninety percent Grauman’s. Little Sid’s.
He was, some said, knee-high to a midget, the eighth Dwarf Cinema Munchkin, all four feet bursting with film clips, sound tracks, Kong shrieking on the Empire State, Colman in Shangrila, friend to Garbo, Dietrich, and Hepburn, haberdasher to Chaplin, golf buddy to Laurel and Hardy, keeper of the flame, recollector of ten thousand Pasts … Sid, pourer of cement, imprinter of fair and flat feet, begging and getting pavement autographs.
And there I stood on a lava flow of signatures of ghosts who had abandoned their shoe sizes.
I watched the tourists quietly testing their feet in the vast spread of cement prints, laughing softly.
What a church, I thought. More worshipers here than at St. Vibiana’s.
“Rattigan,” I whispered. “Are you here?”
Chapter Twenty
It was said that Constance Rattigan had the smallest tootsies in all Hollywood, perhaps in the whole world. She had her shoes cobbled in Rome, and airmailed to her twice a year because her old ones were melted from champagne poured by crazed suitors. Small feet, dainty toes, tiny shoes.
Her imprints left in Grauman’s cement the night of August 22, 1929, proved this. Girls testing their size found their feet to be titanic and pitiful and abandoned her prints in despair.
So here I was alone on a strange night in Grauman’s forecourt, the only place in dead, unburied Hollywood where shoppers brought dreams for refunds.
The crowd cleared. I saw her footprints some twenty feet away. I froze.
Because a small man in a black trench coat, a snap-brim hat yanked over his brow, had just tucked his shoes in Rattigan’s footprints.
“Jesus God,” I gasped. “They fit!”
The small man gazed at his tiny shoes. For the first time in forty years, Rattigan’s tracks were occupied.
“Constance,” I whispered.