A Graveyard for Lunatics

Crumley thought about it and his face burned red.

?Exactly,? I said, quietly. ?I don?t know if Roy will ever get married. Right now, his children, his whole life has been stomped down in the dust. Everything he ever loved was murdered. Maybe he?s in here now, solving these deaths, trying, just as we are, to find the Beast, and kill him. Maybe Roy?s gone forever. But if I were Roy, yeah, I?d stay on, hide, and keep searching until I buried the killer with the killed.?

?My lemon trees, huh?? said Crumley, looking off toward the sea. ?My orchids, my rain forest? Done in by someone? Well.?

The phalanx ran by below in the late sunlight and away into the blue shadows.

There was no great gawky whooping-crane warrior with them.

The footsteps and yells faded.

?Let?s go home,? said Crumley.

* * *

At midnight, a sudden wind blew through Crumley?s African garden. All the trees in the neighborhood turned over in their sleep.

Crumley studied me. ?I can feel something coming.?

It came.

?The Brown Derby,? I said, stunned. ?My God, why didn?t I think sooner!? The night Clarence ran off in a panic. He dropped his portfolio, left it lying on the walk by the Brown Derby entrance! Someone must?ve picked it up. It might still be there, waiting for Clarence to calm down and dare to sneak back for it. His address would have to be in it.?

?Good lead,? Crumley nodded. ?I?ll follow up.?

The night wind blew again, a very melancholy sigh through the lemon and orange trees.

?And??

?And??

?The Brown Derby again. The maitre d? might not talk to us, but I know someone who ate there every week for years, when I was a kid??

?Oh, God,? Crumley sighed. ?Rattigan. She?ll eat you alive.?

?My love will protect me!?

?God, put that in a sack and we?ll fertilize the San Fernando Valley.?

?Friendship protects. You wouldn?t hurt me, would you??

?Don?t count on it.?

?We got to do something. Roy?s hiding. If they, whoever they are, find him, he?s dead.?

?You, too,? said Crumley, ?if you play amateur detective. It?s late. Midnight.?

?Constance?s wake-up hour.?

?Transylvania time? Hell.? Crumley took a deep breath. ?Do I drive you??

A single peach fell from a hidden garden tree. It thumped.

?Yes!? I said.

34

?At dawn,? said Crumley, ?if you?re singing soprano, don?t call.?

And he drove off.

Constance?s house was, as before, a perfection, a white shrine set to glow on the shoreline. All of its doors and windows stood wide. Music played inside the huge stark white living room: some old Benny Goodman.

I walked the shore as I had walked a thousand nights back, checking the ocean. She was there somewhere racing porpoises, echoing seals.

I looked in at the parlor floor, littered with four dozen circus-bright pillows, and the bare white walls where, late nights until dawn, the shadow shows passed, her old films projected from the years before I was born.

I turned because a wave, heavier than the rest, had slammed on the shore

To deliver forth, as from the rug tossed at Caesar?s feet

Constance Rattigan.

She came out of the wave like a loping seal, with hair almost the same color, slick brown and water combed, and her small body powdered with nutmeg and doused in cinnamon oil. Every autumn tint was hers in nimble legs and wild arms, wrists, and hands. Her eyes were a wicked wise merry small creature?s brown. Her laughing mouth looked stained by walnut juice. She was a frisking November surf creature rinsed out of a cold sea but hot as burnt chestnuts to touch.

?Son of a bitch,? she cried. ?You!?

?Daughter of the Nile! You!?

She flung herself against me like a dog, to get all the wetness off on someone else, grabbed my ears, kissed my brow, nose, and mouth, then turned in a circle to show all sides.