A Graveyard for Lunatics

?Who said you had to?? said Crumley. ?Grab a cot, any room, or the jungle compound.?

?No,? murmured Constance. ?That?s his place.?

We all looked at the blank wall where only a lingering retinal image of the Beast faded.

?He didn?t follow us,? said Crumley.

?He might.? Constance blew her nose. ?I won?t be alone in some damned empty house by a damned ocean full of monsters tonight. I?m getting old. Next thing you know I?ll ask some jerk to marry me, God help him.?

She looked out at Crumley?s jungle and the night wind stirring the palm leaves and the high grass. ?He?s there.?

?Cut it,? said Crumley. ?We don?t know if we were followed through that graveyard tunnel to that office. Or who slammed the tomb door. Could?ve been the wind.?

?It always is?? Constance shivered like someone coming down with a long winter?s illness. ?Now what?? She sank back in her chair, shuddering, clutching her elbows.

?Here.?

Crumley laid out a series of photocopies of newspapers on the kitchen table. Three dozen items, large and small, from the last day in October and the first week in November 1934.

?ARBUTHNOT, STUDIO MAGNATE, KILLED IN CAR CRASH? was the first one. ?C. Peck Sloane, associate producer at Maximus studio, and his wife, Emily, killed in same accident.?

Crumley tapped the third article. ?The Sloanes were buried the same day as Arbuthnot. Services in the same church across from the graveyard. All buried in the same graveyard, over the wall.?

?Where?d the accident happen??

?Three in the morning. Gower and Santa Monica!?

?My God! The corner of the graveyard! And around the block from the studio!?

?Awfully convenient, right??

?Saved travel. Die outside a mortuary, all they do is cart you in.?

Crumley scowled at another column. ?Seems there was a wild Halloween party.?

?And Sloane and Arbuthnot were there??

?Doc Phillips, it says here, offered to drive them home, they?d been drinking and refused. The doc drove his own car ahead of the other two cars, to clear the way, and went through a yellow light. Arbuthnot and Sloane followed, against the red. An unknown car almost hit them. The only car on the street at 3 A.M.! Arbuthnot?s and Sloane?s cars swerved, lost control, hit a telephone pole. Doc Phillips was there with his medical kit. No use. All dead. They took the bodies to the mortuary one hundred yards away.?

?Dear God,? I said. ?It?s too damn neat!?

?Yeah,? mused Crumley. ?A helluva responsibility for the pill-pushing dopester Doc. Coincidence, him at the scene. Him in charge of studio medicine and studio police! Him delivering the bodies to the mortuary. Him preparing the bodies for burial as funeral director? Sure? He had stock in the graveyard. Helped dig the first graves in the early twenties. Got ?em coming, going, and in between.?

Flesh really does crawl, I thought, feeling my upper arms.

?Did Doc Phillips sign the death certificates??

?I thought you?d never ask.? Crumley nodded.

Constance, who had sat frozen to one side, staring at the news clippings, spoke at last, from lips that barely moved: ?Where?s that bed??

I led her into the next room and sat her on the bed. She held my hands as if they were an open Bible and took a deep breath.

?Kid, anyone ever tell you your body smells like cornflakes and your breath like honey??

?That was H. G. Wells. Drove women mad.?

?Too late for madness. God, your wife?s lucky, going to bed nights with health food.?

She laid herself down with a sigh. I sat on the floor, waiting for her to close her eyes.

?How come,? she murmured, ?you haven?t aged in three years, and me? a thousand.? She laughed quietly. One large tear moved from her right eye and dissolved into the pillow.

?Aw, shit,? she mourned.

?Tell me,? I prompted. ?Say it. What??

?I was there,? Constance murmured. ?Twenty years ago. At the studio. Halloween night.?

I held my breath. Behind me, a shadow moved into the doorway, Crumley was there, quiet and listening.

Constance stared out past me at another year and another night.

?It was the wildest party I?d ever seen. Everyone in masks, nobody knowing who or what was drinking which or why. There was hooch on every sound stage and barking in the alleys, and if Tara and Atlanta had been built that night they would have burned. There must have been two hundred dress and three hundred undress extras, running booze back and forth through that graveyard tunnel as if Prohibition was in full swing. Even with hooch legal, I guess it?s hard to give up the fun, yes? Secret passages between the tombs and the turkeys, like the flop films rotting in the vaults? Little did they know they?d brick the damn tunnel up, a week later, after the accident.?