never do this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call it the coward's way out.' '‘
I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible ailment in the face-- Vernon's cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son--I might make an exception, but take the pipe just because you were depressed? That was for pansies.
``Then I thought, `But that's Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a figment of your imagination.' That idea wouldn't live, though. It's the dumbbells of the world--politicians and lawyers, for the most part--who sneer at imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or feel it or fuck it. They think that way because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I knew better. Hell, I ought to--my imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or so.
`At the same time, I knew I couldn't go on living in what I used to think of as `the real world,' by which I suppose we all mean `the only world.' That's when I started to realize there was only one place left where I could go and feel welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here--Los Angeles, in 1930- something. And the person was you.'‘
I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn't turn around.
Partly because I was afraid to.
And partly because I no longer knew if I could.
VI. Umney's Last Case.
On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look at the woman on the corner, who was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a momentary length of beautiful leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy was holding out his battered old baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating six feet above the street like a ghost called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from Peoria Smith's overturned table.
Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold, the recently deceased Cuban bandleader below it.
Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off.
`At first I thought that meant I'd be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward, thinking I was you, but that was all right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you see? And then, gradually, I began to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way I could actually . . . well . . . slip all the way in. And do you know what the key was?’
``Yes,'' I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget revolved, and suddenly the newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two later an old DeSoto rolled jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the baseball glove, and both he and the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled halfway to the gutter, then froze solid again.
``You do?' He sounded surprised.
``Yeah. Peoria was the key.'‘
``That's right.'' He laughed, then cleared his throat--nervous sounds, both of them.
`I keep forgetting that you're me.'‘
It was a luxury I didn't have.
`I was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter One six different ways to Sunday before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.'‘
That made me swing around in a hurry. ``The hell you say!'‘
`I didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all along. I don't want to convene the lit class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade--writing stories in the first person is a funny, tricky business. It's as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a series of letters or dispatches from some far-off battle zone. It's very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this case I did. It was as if your little part of Sunset Boulevard were the Garden of Eden--'‘
`I never heard it called that before,'' I remarked.
``--and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria Smith.'‘
Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken, although the sky was cloudless. The Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment there was just a hole where it had been, and then a new building filled it--a restaurant called Petit Dejeuner with a window full of ferns. I glanced up the street and saw that other changes were going on--new buildings were replacing old ones with silent, spooky speed.
They meant I was running out of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew something else, as well--there was probably not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. When God walks into your office and tells you He's decided he likes your life better than His own, what the hell are your options?
`I junked all the various drafts of the novel I'd started two months after my wife's death,'' Landry said. `It was easy--poor crippled things that they were. And then I started a new one. I called it .
. . can you guess, Clyde?'‘
``Sure,'' I said, and swung around. It took all my strength, but what I suppose this geek would call my ``motivation'‘
was good. Sunset Strip isn't exactly the Champs Elysees or Hyde Park, but it's my world. I didn't want to watch him tear it apart and rebuild it the way he wanted it. `I suppose you called it Umney's Last Case.'‘
He looked faintly surprised. ``You suppose right.'‘
I waved my hand. It was an effort, but I managed. `I didn't win the Shamus of the Year Award in 1934 and '35 for nothing, you know.'‘
He smiled at that. ``Yes. I always did like that line.'‘
