A Graveyard for Lunatics

?That thing we talked about? The rain? And the man on the ladder??

?Yes!??

?I saw him,? said J. C.

?My God, J. C.! Then what did he look like? What??

?Shh!? he added, forefinger to his serene lips.

And returned to Calvary.

Constance drove me back to my house just after dawn.

There didn?t seem to be any strange cars with spies waiting in them on my street.

Constance made a big thing of wallowing all over me at my front door.

?Constance! The neighbors!?

?Neighbors, my patootie!? She kissed me so hard my watch stopped. ?Bet your wife doesn?t kiss like that!?

?I?d have been dead six months ago!?

?Hold yourself where it matters, as I slam the door!?

I grabbed and held. She slammed and drove off. Almost instantly I was filled with loneliness. It was like Christmas going away forever.

In my bed I thought: J. C., damn you! Why couldn?t you have said more?

And then: Clarence! Wait for me!

I?m coming back!

One last try!

45

At noon I went to Beachwood Avenue.

Clarence had not waited.

I knew that when I forced the half-open door of his bungalow court apartment. Snowstorms of torn paper, crushed books, and slashed pictures lay against it, much like the Stage 13 massacre, where Roy?s dinosaurs lay kicked and stomped to ruin.

?Clarence??

I shoved the door wider.

It was a geologist?s nightmare.

There was a foot-thick layer of letters, notes signed by Robert Taylor and Bessie Love and Ann Harding way back in 1935 or earlier. That was the top stratum.

Further down, spread in a glossy blanket, lay thousands of photographs that Clarence had snapped of Al Jolson, John Garfield, Lowell Sherman, and Madam Schumann-Heink. Ten thousand faces stared up at me. Most were dead.

Under more layers were autograph books, film histories, posters from ten dozen flickers, starting with Bronco Billy Anderson and Chaplin and fidgeting up through those years when the clutch of lilies known as the Gish Sisters paled across the screen to lachrymose the immigrant heart. And at last, beneath Kong, The Lost World, Laugh Clown Laugh, and under all the spider kings, talcumed toe dancers and lost cities I saw:

A shoe.

The shoe belonged to a foot. The foot, twisted, belonged to an ankle. The ankle led to a leg. And so on up along a body until I saw a face of final hysteria. Clarence, hurled and filed between one hundred thousand calligraphies, drowned in floods of ancient publicity and illustrated passions that might have crushed and drowned him, had he not already been dead.

By his look, he might have died from cardiac arrest, the simplest recognition of death. His eyes were sprung flash-photo wide, his mouth in a frozen gape: What are you doing to my tie, my throat, my heart?! Who are you?

I had read somewhere that, dying, the victim?s retina photographs its killer. If that retina could be stripped and drowned in emulsion, the murderer?s face would rise from darkness.

Clarence?s wild eyes begged to be so stripped. His destroyer?s face was frozen in each.

I stood in the flood of trash, staring. Too much! Every file had been tumbled, hundreds of pictures chewed. Posters torn from walls, bookcases exploded. Clarence?s pockets had been yanked out. No robber had ever brutalized like this.

Clarence, who feared to be killed in traffic, and so waited at street signals until the traffic was absolutely clear so he could run his true pals, his pet albums effaces, safely across.

Clarence.

I turned round-about, wildly hoping to find a single clue to save for Crumley.

The drawers to Clarence?s desk had been jerked free and their contents eviscerated.

A few pictures remained on the walls. My eyes roved and fixed on one.

Jesus Christ on the Calvary backlot.