A Graveyard for Lunatics (Crumley Mysteries 2)

“How come I feel ashamed?” I sat back down, heavily, and would not look at Roy’s pad.

“Because you’re not him and he’s not you. Thank God and count his mercies. What if I tear this up and we leave? How many more months do we search to find something as sad, as terrible as this?”

I swallowed hard. “Never.”

“Right. This night won’t come again. Now just sit still, eat, and wait.”

“I’ll wait but I won’t be still and I’m going to be awfully sad.”

Roy looked at me straight. “See these eyes?”

“Yes.”

“What do you see?”

“Tears.”

“Which proves I care as much as you do, but can’t help myself. Simmer down. Drink.”

He poured more champagne.

“It tastes awful,” I said.

Roy drew and the face was there. It was a face that was in an entire stage of collapse; as if the occupant, the mind behind the apparition, had run and swum a thousand miles and was now sinking to die. If there was bone behind the flesh, it had been shattered and reassembled in insect forms, alien facades masked in ruin. If there was a mind behind the bone, lurking in caverns of retina and tympanum, it signaled madly from out the swiveling eyes.

And yet, once the food was placed and the champagne poured, Roy and I sat riven by the bursts of incredible laughter that ricocheted off the walls behind the screen. At first the woman did not respond but then as the hour passed, her quiet amusement grew almost to match his. But his laughter at last sounded true as a bell, while hers risked hysteria.

I drank heavily to keep myself in place. When the champagne bottle was emptied, the maître d’ brought another and waved my hand away as I groped for my empty wallet.

“Groc,” he said, but Roy did not hear. He was filling page after page of his pad, and as the time passed and the laughter rose, his sketches became more grotesque, as if the shouts of pure enjoyment drove his remembrance and filled a page. But at last the laughter quieted. There was a soft bustle of preparatory leavetaking behind the screen and the maître d’ stood at our table.

“Please,” he murmured. “We must close. Would you mind?” He nodded toward the door and stood aside, pulling the table out. Roy stood up. He looked at the Oriental screen.

“No,” said the maître d’. “The proper order is you depart first.”

I was halfway to the door and had to turn back. “Roy?” I said. And Roy followed, backing off as if departing from a theatre and the play not over.

As Roy and I came out, a taxicab was pulling up to the curb. The street was empty save for a medium-tall man in a long camel’s-hair coat standing with his back to us, close to the curb. The portfolio tucked under his left arm gave him away. I had seen that portfolio day after day in the summers of my boyhood and young manhood in front of Columbia studios, Paramount, MGM, and all the rest. It had been filled with beautifully drawn portraits of Garbo, Colman, Gable, Harlow, and at one time or another a thousand others, all signed in purple ink. All kept by a mad autograph collector now grown old. I hesitated, then stopped.

“Clarence?” I called.

The man shrank, as if he didn’t wish to be recognized.

“It is you, isn’t it?” I called, q

uietly, and touched his elbow. “Clarence, right?”

The man flinched, but at last turned his head. The face was the same, with gray lines and bone paleness to make it older.

“What?” he said.

“Remember me?” I said. “Sure you do. I used to run around Hollywood with those three crazy sisters. One of them made those flowered Hawaiian shirts Bing Crosby wore in his early films. I was in front of Maximus every noon in the summer of 1934. You were there. How could I forget. You had the only sketch of Garbo I ever saw, signed—”

My litany only made things worse. With every word, Clarence shrank inside his big camel’s-hair coat.

He nodded nervously. He glanced at the door of the Brown Derby nervously.

“What’re you doing here so late?” I said. “Everyone’s gone home.”