“Which means you’ve milked the cow and got a bucket of I-won’t-say. You want me polite or impolite?”
“Both, Henry. Things are nuts. Maggie’s back east. I got Crumley here, of course, but—”
“Which means you need a blind man to find your way out of a cowshed full of cowsheds, right? Hell, let me get my hankie.” He blew his nose. “How soon do you need this all-seeing nose?”
“Yesterday.”
“I’m there now! Hollywood, visiting some poor black trash.”
“You know Grauman’s Chinese?”
“Hell, yes!”
“How quickly can you meet me there?”
“As quick as you want, son. I’ll be standing in Bill Robinson’s tap-dancer shoes. Do we visit another graveyard?”
“Almost.”
I called Crumley to say where I was going, that I might be late getting to Rattigan’s, but that I’d be bringing Henry with me.
“The blind leading the blind,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He was standing exactly where he said he would be: in Bill Robinson’s “copasetic” dancing footprints, not banished to that long-gone nigger heaven but out front where thousands of passing whites could see.
His body was erect and quiet, but his shoes were itching around in Bill Robinson’s marks, ever so serenely. His eyes were shut, like his mouth, turned in on a pleased imagination.
I stood in front of him and exhaled.
Henry’s mouth burst.
“Wrigley’s Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, with Wrigley’s Doublemint, Doublemint Gum! Don’t get it on me!” He laughed, seized my elbows. “Lord, boy, you look fine! I don’t have to see to know. You’ve always sounded like some of those people up on the screen!”
“That comes from sneaking into too many movies.”
“Let me feel you, boy. Hey, you been drinking lotsa malts!”
“You look swell, Henry.”
“I always wondered what I looked like.”
“The way Bill Robinson sounds is how you shape, Henry.”
“Am I in his shoes here? Say yes.”
“A perfect fit. Thanks for coming, Henry.”
“Had to. It’s one helluva time since we ransacked graveyards! I go to sleep nights running those graves ahead or behind. What kind of graveyard’s here?”
I glanced at Grauman’s Oriental facade.
“Ghosts. That’s what I said when I snuck backstage when I was six and stared up at all those black-and-white things leering on the screen. The Phantom playing the organ has his mask yanked off and jumps thirty feet tall to kill you with one stare. Pictures tall and wide and pale and the actors mostly dead. Ghosts.”
“Did your folks hear you talk like that?”
“With them? Mum’s the word.”