I ran to the surf-line and started to shuck off my shoes, when Constance, spraying water like a seal and shaking like a dog, exploded from the waves and trudged in. When she hit the hard, wet sand she stopped and threw up. It popped out of her mouth like a cork. She stood, hands on hips, looking down at the stuff on the surf- line as the tide drifted it away.
?I?ll be damned,? she said, curiously. ?That hairball must?ve been in there all those years!?
She turned to look me up and down, the color coming back into her cheeks. She flicked her fingers at me, tossing sea-rain on my face, as if to freshen me.
?Does swimming,? I pointed at the ocean, ?
?The day it doesn?t I?ll never come out again,? she said quietly. ?A quick swim, a quick lay works. I can?t help Arbuthnot or Sloane, they?re rotten dead. Or Emily Wickes??
She froze, then changed the name, ?Emily
?Is Wickes her
?With my hairball out, I need some champagne in. C?mon.?
She opened a bottle by her blue-tiled pool and poured our glasses full.
?You going to be fool enough to try to save Emily Wickes
?Who?ll stop us?? said Crumley.
?The whole studio! No, maybe three people who know she?s there. You?ll need introductions. No one gets in Hollyhock House without Constance Rattigan. Don?t look at me that way. I?ll help.?
Crumley drank his champagne and said: ?One last thing. Who took charge that night, twenty years ago. It must have been bad. Who??
?Directed it? It had to be directed, sure. People were running over each other, screaming. It was
?Fritz Wong!?? I exploded.
?Fritz,? said Constance Rattigan, ?Wong.?
65
Fritz?s eyrie, halfway up from the Beverly Hills Hotel toward Mulholland, had a view of some ten million lights on the vast floor of Los Angeles. From a long elegant marble porch fronting his villa, you could watch the jets fifteen miles away coming in to land, bright torches, slow meteors in the sky, one every minute.
Fritz Wong yanked his house door wide and blinked out, pretending not to see me.
I handed over his monocle from my pocket. He seized and slotted it.
?Arrogant son of a bitch.? The monocle flashed from his right eye like a guillotine blade. ?So! It?s you! The coming-great arrives to bug the soon-vanishing. The ascendant king knocks up the has-been prince. The writer who tells the lions what to say to Daniel visits the tamer who tells them what to
?Here are the pages.? I walked in. ?Maggie? you
Maggie, in a far corner of the parlor, nodded, pale, but, I could see, recovered.
?Ignore Fritz,? she said. ?He?s full of codswallop and liver-wurst.?
?Go sit with the Slasher and shut up,? said Fritz, letting his monocle burn holes in my pages.
?Yes?? I looked at Hitler?s picture on the wall and clicked my heels??sir!?
Fritz glanced up, angrily. ?Stupid! That picture of the maniac housepainter is there to remind me of the big bastards I ran from so as to arrive at little ones. Dear God, the facade of Maximus Films is a clone of the Brandenburg Gate!
I downed my
For just beyond Maggie Botwin was the most incredible religious shrine I had ever seen. It was brighter, bigger, more beauteous than the silver and gold altar at St. Sebastian?s.
?Fritz,? I exclaimed.
For this dazzling shrine was shelved with creme de menthes, brandies, whiskeys, cognacs, ports, Burgundies and Bordeaus, stored in layers of crystal and bright glass tubing. It gleamed like an undersea grotto from which schools of luminous bottles might swarm. Above and around it hung scores and hundreds of fine Swedish cut crystal, Lalique, and Waterford. It was a celebratory throne, the birthing place of Louis the Fourteenth, an Egyptian Sun King?s tomb, Napoleon?s Empiric Coronation dais. It was a toyshop window at midnight on Christmas Eve. It was?
?As you know,? I said, ?I rarely drink??
Fritz?s monocle fell. He caught and replanted it.
?What will you have?? he barked.
I avoided his contempt by remembering a wine I had heard him mention.
?Gorton,? I said, ? ?38.?
