Foley’s eyebrows went like that. “Well, hell, let’s see it!”
They walked over into the film laboratory to get the film. Cleve was frankly afraid of the place. Always had been. It was a huge dark mortuary building with dead-end passages and labyrinths of black walls to cut the light. You stumbled through pitch dark, touching the walls, careening, turning, cursing, twisting around cutouts; walked south, east, west, south again and suddenly found yourself in a green-freckled space as big as the universe. Nothing to see but green welts and splashes of light, dim snakes of film climbing, winding over spools from floor to high ceiling and back down. The one brilliant light was a printing light that shot from a projector and printed negative to positive as they slid by in parallel slots. The positive then coiled over and down into a long series of developing baths. The place was a whining morgue. Juke Davis moved around in it with ghoul-like movements.
“There’s no soundtrack. I’ll develop it and splice it in later,” said Davis. “Here you are, Mr. Foley. Here’s your film.”
They took the film and retreated back through the labyrinth.
In the projection room Cleve and the detectives Foley and Sadlowe, with Jamie Winters operating the projector in the booth, watched the death scene printed on the screen for them. Stage twelve had been slammed shut, and other officers were back there, talking, grilling everyone in alphabetical order.
On the screen Diana laughed. Robert Denim laughed back. It was very silent. They opened mouths but no sounds came out. People danced behind them. Diana and Robert Denim danced now, gracefully, quietly, leisurely. When they stopped dancing they talked seriously with—Tally Durham and Georgie Kroll.
Foley spoke. “You say that this fellow Kroll loved Diana too?”
Cleve nodded. “Who didn’t?”
Foley said, “Yeah. Who didn’t. Well—” He stared with suspicion at the screen. “How about this Tally Durham woman. Was she jealous?”
Was there any woman in Hollywood who didn’t hate Diana because she was perfect? Cleve spoke of Tally’s love for Georgie Kroll.
“It never fails,” replied Foley with a shake of his head.
Cleve said, “Tally may have killed Diana. Who knows. Georgie’d have a motive too. Diana treated him like a rag doll. He wanted her and couldn’t have her. That happened to a lot of men in Diana’s life. If she ever loved anybody, it was Robert Denim, and that didn’t last. Denim is a little too—tough, I guess that’s how you’d put it.”
Foley snorted. “Good going. We got three suspects in one scene. Any one of them could have dosed that pop bottle with nicotine. The lights were out for a minute and a half. In that time any guy who ever bought Black Leaf Forty nicotine sulfate at the corner garden store could have tossed twenty drops of it in her drink and gone back playing innocent when the lights bloomed again. Nuts.”
Sadlowe spoke for the first time that evening. “There ought to be some way to splice out the innocents from this film.” A brilliant observation.
Cleve caught his breath. She was dying.
She died like she had done everything in her life. You had to admire the way she did it, with the grace, fire, and control of a fine cat-animal. In the middle of the scene she forgot her lines. Her fingers crawled slowly to her throat and she turned. Her face changed. She looked straight out at you from the screen as if she knew this was her biggest and, to a cynic, her best scene.
Then she fell, like a silken canopy from which the supports had been instantly withdrawn.
Denim crouched over her, mouthing the word, “Diana!”
And Tally Durham screamed a silent scream as the film shivered and fluttered into blackness, numbers, amber colors, and then nothing but glaring light.
Oh, God, press a button somewhere! Run the reel backward and bring her back to life! Press a button as you see in those comic newsreels; in which smashed trains are reintegrated, fallen emperors are enthroned, the sun rises in the west and— Diana Coyle rises from the dead!
From the booth Jamie Winters’s voice said, “That’s it. That’s all of it. You want to see it again?”
Foley said, “Yeah. Show it to us half a dozen times.”
“Excuse me,” gasped Cleve.
“Where you going?”
He went out into the rain. It beat cold on him. Behind him, inside, Diana was dying again and again and again, like a trained puppet. Cleve clenched his jaw and looked straight up at the sky and let the night cry on him, all over him, soaking him through and through; in perfect harmony, the night and he and the crying dark.…
* * *
The storm lasted until morning both inside and outside the studio. Foley yelled at everybody. Everybody answered back calmly that they weren’t guilty; yes, they had hated Diana, but at the same time loved her, yes, they were jealous of her, but she was a good girl too.
Foley evolved a colossal idea, invited all suspects to the projection room and scared hell out of everyone, proving nothing, by showing them Diana’s last scene. R. J. Guilding broke down and sobbed, Georgie squeaked, and Tally screamed. Cleve got sick to his stomach, and the night went on and on.
Georgie said yes, yes, he’d loved Diana; Tally said yes, yes, she’d hated her; Guilding reaffirmed the fact that Diana had stalled production, causing trouble; and Robert Denim admitted to an attempted reconciliation between himself and his former wife. Jamie Winters told how Diana had stayed up late nights, ruining her face for proper photography. And R
. J. Guilding snapped, “Diana told me you were photographing her poorly, on purpose!”