Jamie Winters was calm. “That’s not true. She was trying to shove the blame for her complexion off on someone else, me.”
Foley said, “You were in love with her too?”
Winters replied, “Why do you think I became her photographer?”
So when dawn came Diana was still as dead as the night before. Big stage doors thundered aside and the suspects wearily shambled out to climb into their cars and start home.
Cleve watched them through aching eyes. Silently he walked around the studio, checking everything when it didn’t need checking. He smelled the sweet green odor of the cemetery over the wall.
Funny Hollywood. It builds a studio next door to a graveyard. Right over that wall there. Sometimes it seemed everyone in movietown tried to scale that wall. Some poured themselves over in a whiskey tide, some smoked themselves over; all of them looked forward to an office in Hollywood Cemetery— with no phones. Well, Diana didn’t have to climb that wall.
Someone had pushed her over.…
Cleve held on to the steering wheel, tight, hard, wanting to break it, telling the world to get out of the way, dammit! He was beginning to get mad!
They buried her on a bright California day with a stiff wind blowing and too many red and yellow and blue flowers and the wrong kind of tears.
That was the first day Cleve ever drank enough to get drunk. He would always remember that day.
The studio phoned three days later.
“Say, Morris, what’s eating you? Where you been?”
“In my apartment,” said Cleve dully.
He kept the radio off, he didn’t walk the streets like he used to at night, dreaming. He neglected the newspapers; they had big pictures of her in them. The radio talked about her, so he almost wrecked the thing. When the week was over she was safely in the earth, and the newspapers had tapered off the black ink wreaths, were telling her life story on page two the following Wednesday; page four Thursday; page five Friday; page ten Saturday; and by the following Monday they wrote the concluding chapter and slipped it in among the stock-market reports on page twenty-nine.
You’re slipping, Diana! Slipping! You used to make page one!
Cleve went back to work.
By Friday there was nothing left but that new stone in Hollywood Cemetery. Papers rotted in the flooded gutters, washing away the ink of her name; the radio blatted war, and Cleve worked with his eyes looking funny and changed.
He buzzed doors all day, and people went in and out. He watched Tally dance in every morning, smaller and chipper, and happy now that Diana was gone, holding on to Georgie, who was all hers now, except his mind and soul. He watched Robert Denim walk in, and they never spoke to each other. He waved hello to Jamie Winters and was courteous to R. J. Guilding.
But he watched them all, like a dialogue director waiting for one muffed line or missed cue.
And finally the papers announced casually that her death had been attributed to suicide, and it was a closed chapter.
* * *
A couple of weeks later Cleve was still sticking to his apartment, reading and thinking, when the phone rang.
“Cleve? This is Jamie Winters. Look, cop-man, come out of it. You’re wanted at a party, now, tonight. I got some film clips from Gable’s last picture.”
There was argument. In the end Cleve gave in and went to the party. They sat in Jamie Winters’s parlor facing a small-size screen. Winters showed them scenes from pictures that never reached the theater. Garbo tripping over a light cord and falling on her platform. Spencer Tracy blowing his lines and swearing. William Powell sticking his tongue out at the camera when he forgot his next cue. Cleve laughed for the first time in a million years.
Jamie Winters had an endless collection of film clips of famous stars blowing up and saying censorable things.
And when Diana Coyle showed up, it was like a kick in the stomach. Like being shot with two barrels of a shotgun! Cleve jerked and gasped, and shut his eyes, clenching the chair.
Then, suddenly, he was very cool. He had an idea. Looking at the screen, it came to him, like cold rain on his cheeks. “Jamie!” he said.
In the sprocketing darkness, Jamie replied, “Yes?”
“I’ve got to see you in the kitchen, Jamie.”
“Why?”