Let's All Kill Constance - Bradbury Ray Douglas - Страница 9

"Creative adhesive! Japanese bushido! American bull! Once those things are off the wall, like you, do they propagate?"

"Why not? If you don't put in, you never get out."

"Wait while I kill this." Crumley drank. "Lie down with porcupines, get up with pandas?" He nodded at all those pictures, names, and lives. "Constance in there somewhere?"

"Hidden."

"Hit the shower. I'll stand guard on the obituaries. If they move, I'll yell. How does a margarita strike you as nightcap.”

"I thought you'd never ask," I said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

st. Vibiana's Cathedral awaited us. Downtown L.A. Skid Row. At noon, heading east, we stayed off the main boulevards.

"Ever seen W. C. Fields in If I Had a Million? Bought some old tin lizzies and rammed road hogs. Super," said Crumley. "That's why I hate highways. I want to roadkill. You listening?"

"Rattigan," I said. "I thought I knew her." "Hell." Crumley laughed gently. "You don't know anyone. You'll never write the great American novel, because you don't know shoats from shinola. You overestimate character where there is none, so you upchuck fairy princes, virgin milkmaids. Most writers can't even do that, so you go with your taffy pulls, thirteen to the dozen. Let those realists scoop dog doo."

I remained silent.

"Know what your problem is?" Crumley barked, and then softened his voice. "You love people not worth loving."

"Like you, Crum?"

He glanced over cautiously.

"Oh, I'm okay," he admitted. "I've more holes than a sieve, but I haven't fallen through. Hold on!" Crumley hit the brakes. "The pope's home away from home!"

I looked out at St. Vibiana's Cathedral in the midst of the slow-motion desolation of long-dead Skid Row.

"Jesus," I said, "would have built here. You coming in?"

"Hellfires, no! I was kicked outta confession, age twelve, when I skinned my knees on wild women."

"Will you ever take Communion again?"

"When I die. Hop out, buster. From Queen Califia to the Queen of Angels."

I climbed out.

"Say a Hail Mary for me," Crumley said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

INSIDE the cathedral it was empty, just after noon, and just one penitent was waiting by the confessional when a priest arrived and beckoned her in.

His face confirmed I was in the right place.

When the woman left, I ducked in the other side of the confessional, tongue-tied.

A shadow moved in the lattice window.

"Well, my son?"

"Forgive me, Father," I blurted out. "Califia."

The other confessional door banged wide with a curse. I opened my door. The priest reared as if I had shot him.

It was Rattigan Deja Vu. Not svelte in ninety-five pounds of suntanned seal-brown flesh, but marrowed in a wire-coat-hanger skeleton-thin Florentine Renaissance priest. Constance's bones hid there, but the flesh skinned over the bones was skull pale, the priest's lips were ravenous for salvation, not bed and sinful breakfasts. Here was Savonarola begging God to forgive his wild perorations, and God silent, with Constance's ghost burning from his eyes, and peering from his skull.

Father Rattigan, riven, found me harmless save for that word, jerked his head toward the vestry, led me in, and shut the door.

"You her friend?"

"No, sir."

"Good!" He caught himself. "Sit. You have five minutes. The cardinal is waiting."

"You had better go."

"Five minutes," said Constance from inside the mask of this genetic twin. "Well?"

"I've just visited-"

"Califia." Father Rattigan exhaled with controlled despair. "The Queen. Sends people she can't help. She has her church, not mine."

"Constance has disappeared again, Father."

"Again?"

"That's what the Queen, ah, Califia said."

I held out the Book of the Dead. Father Rattigan turned its pages.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Constance. She said someone sent it to her. To scare her, maybe, or hurt her, or God knows what. I mean, only she knows if it's a real threat."

"You think she might just be hiding to spoil things for everyone?" He deliberated. "I myself am of two minds. But then there were those who burned Savonarola then and elevate him now. A most peculiar sinner-cum-saint."

"Aren't there similarities, Father?" I dared to say. "Lots of sinners became saints, yes?"

"What do you know about Florence in 1492 when Savonarola made Botticelli burn his paintings?"

"It's the only age I know, sir, Father. Then Savonarola, now Constance…"

"If Savonarola knew her, he'd kill himself. No, no, let me think. I've starved since dawn. Here's bread and wine. Let's have some before I fall."

The good father pulled a loaf and a jug out of the vestry closet, and we sat. Father Rattigan broke the bread, then poured a small wine for himself, and a large for me, which I took gladly.

"Baptist?" he said.

"How did you guess?"

"I'd rather not say."

I tipped back my glass. "Can you help me with Constance, Father?"

"No. Oh, Lord, Lord, maybe."

He refilled my glass.

"Last night. Can it be? I stayed in the confessional late. I felt… as if I were waiting for someone. Finally, near midnight, a woman entered the confessional and for a long while was silent. Finally, like Jesus calling Lazarus, I insisted, and she wept. It all came out. Sins by the pound and the truckload, sins from last year, ten years, thirty years past, she couldn't stop, on and on, night on dreadful night, on and on, and finally she was still and I was about to instruct her with Hail Marys when I heard her running. I checked the other side of the confessional but only smelled perfume. Oh Lord, Lord."

"Your sister's scent?"

"Constance?" Father Rattigan sank back. "Hell burned twice, that perfume."

Last night, I thought. So close. If Crumley and I had only come then.

"You'd better go, Father," I said.

"The cardinal will wait."

"Well," I said, "if she returns, would you call me?"

"No," said the priest. "The confessional's as private as a lawyer's office. Are you that upset?"

"Yes." I twisted the wedding ring on my finger, absently.

Father Rattigan noticed.

"Does your wife know all this?"

"Approximately."

"That sounds like delicatessen morality."

"My wife trusts me."

"Wives do that, God bless them. Does my sister seem worth saving?"

"Doesn't she to you?"

"Dear God, I gave up when she claimed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was a Kama Sutra pose."

"Constance! Still, Father, if she shows up again, could you call my number and hang up? I'd know you were signaling her arrival."

"You do know how to split hairs. Give me your number. I see in you not so much a Baptist but a fair Christian."

I gave him my number as well as Crumley's.

"Just one ring, Father."

The priest studied the numbers. "We all live on the slope. But some, by a miracle, grow roots. Don't wait. Your phone may never ring. But I'll give your number to my assistant, Betty Kelly, too, just in case. Why are you doing this?"