63
I climbed the stairs to Maggie Botwin’s palace of reptiles. So called because of all the dropped scenes, the sidewinder film coils in the bin or slithering across the floor.
The small room was empty. The old ghosts had fled. The snakes had gone to ground somewhere else.
I stood in the middle of empty shelves, looking around until I found a note pasted to the top of her silent Moviola.
DEAR GENIUS. TRIED CALLING YOU DURING THE PAST TWO HOURS. WE HAVE QUIT THE BATTLE OF JERICHO AND FLED. WE WILL FIGHT THE FINAL BATTLE AT MY HILLSIDE BUNKER. CALL. COME! SIEG HEIL, FRITZ AND JACQUELINE THE RIPPER.
I folded the note to stash in my diary and read in my old age. I walked down the steps and out of the studio.
There were no storm troopers in sight.
64
Walking along the shore, I told Crumley about the priest, and the path through the weeds and the two women walking there a long time ago.
We found Constance Rattigan on the beach. It was the first time I had ever seen her lying on the sand. Always before she was in her pool or in the sea. Now she lay between, as if she had no strength to go in the water or back to her house. She was so beached, stranded, and pale it hurt me to see.
We crouched down on the sand beside her and waited for her to feel us there, eyes shut.
“You’ve been lying,” Crumley said.
Her eyeballs revolved under her lids. “Which lie do you mean?”
“About your running away in the midst of that midnight p
arty, twenty years ago. You know you stayed until the very end.”
“What did I do?” She turned her head away. We could not see if she was looking out at the gray sea, where an early-afternoon fog was rolling in to spoil the hour.
“They brought you to the scene of the accident. A friend of yours needed help.”
“I never had any friends.”
“Come on, Constance,” said Crumley, “I’ve got the facts. I’ve been collecting facts. Newspapers say there were three funerals on the same day. Father Kelly, over at that church near where the accident really happened, says Emily Sloane died after the funerals. What if I got a court order to break into the Sloanes’ tomb? Would there be one body there or two? One, I think, and Emily gone where? And who took her? You? On whose orders?”
Constance Rattigan’s body trembled. I could not tell if it was some old grief suddenly surfaced in shock, or just the mist now moving around us.
“For a dumb dick, you’re pretty smart,” she said.
“No, just some days I fall in a nest of eggs and don’t break one. Father Kelly told our screenwriter friend here that Emily’s mind was gone. So she had to be led. Were you in charge?”
“God help me,” whispered Constance Rattigan. A wave fell on the shore. A thicker fog reached the surf-line. “Yes …”
Crumley nodded quietly and said: “There must have been a big, a terrible, God knows, a huge coverup, on the spot. Did someone stuff the poorbox? I mean, did the studio promise to, hell, I don’t know, redecorate the altar, finance widows and orphans forever? Hand the priest an impossible fortune every week if he forgot that you walked Emily Sloane out of there?”
“That—” murmured Constance, eyes wide, sitting up now, searching the horizon—“was part of it.”
“And more money in the poorbox, and more and more, if the priest said the accident happened not in front of his church but down the street maybe a hundred yards, so he didn’t see Arbuthnot ram the other car, kill his enemy, or his enemy’s wife gone mad at their deaths. Yes?”
“That—” murmured Constance Rattigan, in another year, “almost does it.”
“And did you lead Emily Sloane out of the church an hour later, and, good as dead, did you lead her across an empty lot full of sunflowers and FOR SALE signs—”
“Everything was so close, so convenient, it was a laugh,” remembered Constance, not laughing, her face gray. “The graveyard, the undertaking parlor, the church for some quick funerals, the empty lot, the path, and Emily? Hell. She had gone ahead, in her mind, anyway. All I had to do was steer.”
“And, Constance,” Crumley said, “is Emily Sloane alive today?”