Let's All Kill Constance by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page B

looked over her shoulder at the screen door and some unseen massive ghost.
    "How will you know when she says go?"
    The Gypsy wiped her eyes. "I'll know."
    "Where are you going?" said Crumley.
    Because I was on the walk heading across the street. At the opposite house I knocked.
    Silence. I knocked again.
    I peered through a side window. I could see shapes of furniture in midfloor, where there should be no furniture, and too many lamps, and rolled carpets.
    I kicked the door and cursed and went to the middle of the street and was about to yell at every door when the Gypsy girl came quietly to touch my arm.
    "I can go now," she said.
    "Califia?"
    "Said okay."
    "Where to?" Crumley nodded at his car.
    She could not stop staring at Califia's home, the center of all California.
    "I have friends near the Red Rooster Plaza. Could you—"
    "I could," said Crumley.
    The Gypsy looked back at the vanishing palace of a queen.
    "I will be back tomorrow," she called.
    "She knows you will," I said.
    We passed Callahan and Ortega, but this time Crumley ignored it.
    We were quiet on the way to the plaza named for a rooster of a certain color.
    We dropped the Gypsy.
    "My God," I said on the way back, "it's like a friend, years ago, died, and the immigrants from Cuernavaca poured in, grabbed his collection of old 1900 phonographs, Caruso records, Mexican masks. Left his place like the Egyptian tombs, empty."
    "That's what it's like to be poor," said Crumley.
    "I grew up poor. I never stole."
    "Maybe you never had a real chance."
    We passed Queen Califia's place a final time.
    "She's in there, all right. The Gypsy was right."
    "She was right. But you're nuts."
    "All this," I said. "It's too much. Too much. Constance hands me two wrong-number phone books and flees. We almost drown in twenty thousand leagues of old newspapers. Now, a dead queen. Makes me wonder, is Father Rattigan okay?"
    Crumley swerved the car to the curb near a phone booth.
    "Here's a dime!"
    In the phone booth I dialed the cathedral.
    "Is Mister ..." I blushed. "Father Rattigan ... is he all right?"
    "All right? He's at confession!"
    "Good," I said foolishly, "as long as the one he's confessing is okay."
    "Nobody," said the voice, "is ever okay!"
    I heard a click. I dragged myself back to the car. Crumley eyed me like a dog's dinner. "Well?"
    "He's alive. Where are we going?"
    "Who knows. From here on, this trip is a retreat. You know Catholic retreats? Long silent weekends. Shut la trap. Okay?"
    We drove to Venice City Hall. Crumley got out and slammed his door.
    He was gone half an hour. When he returned he stuck his head in the driver's-side window and said, "Now hear this, I just took a week's sick leave. And, Jesus, this is sick. We got one week to find Constance, shield St. Vibiana's priest, raise the Lazarus dead, and warn your wife to stop me from strangling you. Nod your head yes."
    I nodded.
    "Next twenty-four hours you don't speak without permission! Now where are those goddamn phone books?"
    I handed him the Books of the Dead.
    Crumley, behind the wheel, scowled at them.
    "Say one last thing and shut up!"
    "You're still my pal!" I blurted.
    "Pity," he said, and banged the gas.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

    WE went back to Rattigan's and stood down on the shoreline. It was early evening and her lights were still full on; the place was like a full moon and a rising sun of architecture. Gershwin was still manhandling Manhattan one moment, Paris the next.
    "I bet they buried him in his piano," said Crumley.
    We got out the one Book of the Dead, Rattigan's personal phone pals, mostly cold and buried, and repeated what we had done before. Went through it page by page, with a growing sense of mortality.
    On page 30 we came to the R s .
    There it was: Clarence Rattigan's dead phone and a red Christian cross over his name.
    "Damn. Now let's check Califia again."
    We riffled back and there it was, with big red lines under her name and a crucifix.
    "That means—?"
    "Whoever planted this