“Not yet,” he said.
Roy dropped me in front of the commissary. I got out and stood looking at his now-serious, now-amused face.
“You coming in?” I said.
“Soon. Got some errands to run.”
“Roy, you’re not going to do something nutty now, are you? You got that faraway crazed look.”
Roy said, “I been thinking. When did Arbuthnot die?”
“Twenty years ago this week. Two-car accident, three people killed. Arbuthnot and Sloane, his studio accountant, plus Sloane’s wife. It was headlined for days. The funeral was bigger than Valentino’s. I stood outside the graveyard with my friends. Enough flowers for the New Year’s Rose Parade. A thousand people came out of the service, eyes running under their dark glasses. My God, the misery. Arbuthnot was that loved.”
“Car crash, huh?”
“No witnesses. Maybe one was following too close, going home drunk from a studio party.”
“Maybe.” Roy pulled at his lower lip, squinting one eye at me. “But what if there’s more to it? Maybe, this late in time, someone’s discovered something about that crash and is threatening to spill the beans. Otherwise why the body on the wall? Why the panic? Why hush it up if there’s nothing to hide? God, did you hear their voices back there just now? How come a dead man that’s not a dead man, a body that’s not a body, shakes up the executives?”
“There must’ve been more than one letter,” I said. “The one I got, and others. But I’m the only one dumb enough to go see. And when I didn’t spread the word, blurt it out today, whoever put the body on the wall had to write or call in today to start the panic and send in the funeral hearse. And the guy who made the body and sent the note is in here right now, watching the fun. Why … why … why … ?”
“Hush,” said Roy, quietly, “hush.” He started his engine. “We’ll solve the half-ass mystery at lunch. Put on your innocent face. Make like naïve over the Louis B. Mayer bean soup. I gotta go check my miniature models. One last tiny street to nail in place.” He glanced at his watch. “In two hours my dinosaur country will be ready for photography. Then, all we need is our grand and glorious Beast.”
I looked into Roy’s still burning-bright face.
“You’re not going to go steal the body and put it back up on the wall, are you?”
“Never crossed my mind,” said Roy, and drove away.
In the middle of the far-left side of the commissary there was a small platform, no higher than a foot, on which stood a single table with two chairs. I often imagined the slavemaster of a Roman trireme warship seated there crashing down one sledgehammer, then another, to give the beat to the sweating oarsmen locked to their oars, obedient to panics, pulling for some far theatre aisle, pursued by maddened exhibitors, greeted on shore by mobs of insulted customers.
But there never was a Roman galley coxswain at the table, leading the beat.
It was Manny Leiber’s table. He brooded there alone, stirring his food as if it were the split innards of Caesar’s fortuneteller’s pigeons, forking the spleen, ignoring the heart, predicting futures. Some days he slouched there with the studio’s Doc Phillips, testing new philtres and potions in tapwater. Other days, he dined on directors’ or writers’ tripes as they glumly confronted him, nodding, yes, yes, the film was behind schedule! yes, yes, they would hurry it along!
Nobody wanted to sit at that table. Often, a pink slip arrived in lieu of a check.
Today as I ducked in and shrank inches wandering through the tables, Manny’s small platform place was empty. I stopped. That was the first time I had ever seen no dishes, no utensils, not even flowers there. Manny was still outside somewhere, yelling at the sun because it had insulted him.
But now, the longest table in the commissary waited, half full and filling.
I had never gone near the thing in the weeks I had worked in the studio. As with most neophytes, I had feared contact with the terribly bright and terribly famous. H. G. Wells had lectured in Los Angeles when I was a boy, and I had not gone to seek his autograph. The rage of joy at the sight of him would have struck me dead. So it was with the commissary table, where the best directors, film editors, and writers sat at an eternal Last Supper waiting for a late-arriving Christ. Seeing it again, I lost my nerve.
I slunk away, veering off toward a far corner where Roy and I often wolfed sandwiches and soup.
“Oh, no you don’t!” a voice shouted.
My head sank down on my neck, which periscoped, oiled with sweat, into my jacket collar.
Fritz Wong cried, “Your appointment is here. March!”
I ricocheted between tables to stare at my shoes beside Fritz Wong. I felt his hand on my shoulder, ready to rip off my epaulettes.
“This,” announced Fritz, “is our visitor from another world, across the commissary. I will guide him to sit.”
His hands on my shoulders, he forced me gently down.
At last I raised my eyes and looked along the table at twelve people watching me.
“Now,” announced Fritz, “he will tell us about his Search for the Beast!”
The Beast.
Since it had been announced that Roy and I were to write, build, and birth the most incredibly hideous animal in Hollywood history, thousands had helped us in our search. One would have thought we were seeking Scarlett O’Hara or Anna Karenina. But no … the Beast, and the so-called contest to find the Beast, appeared in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. My name and Roy’s were in every article. I clipped and saved every dumb, stillborn item. Photographs had begun to pour in from other studios, agents, and the general public. Quasimodos Numbers Two and Three showed up at the studio gate, as did four Opera Phantoms. Wolfmen abounded. First and second cousins of Lugosi and Karloff, hiding out on our Stage 13, were thrown off the lot.
Roy and I had begun to feel we were judging an Atlantic City beauty contest somehow shipped to Transylvania. The half-animals waiting outside the sound stages every night were something; the photographs were worse. At last, we burned all the photographs and left the studio through a side entrance.
So it had been with the search for the Beast all month.
And now Fritz Wong said again: “Okay. The Beast? Explain!”
I looked at all those faces and said: “No. No, please. Roy and I will be ready soon, but right now …” I took a fast sip of bad Hollywood tap water, “I’ve been watching this table for three weeks. Everyone always sits at the same place. So-and-so up here, such-and-such over across. I’ll bet the guys down there don’t even know the guys over here. Why not mix it up? Leave spaces so every half hour people could play musical chairs, shift, meet someone new, not the same old guff from familiar faces. Sorry.”
“Sorry!?” Fritz grabbed my shoulders and shook me with his own laughter. “Okay, guys! Musical chairs! Allez-oop!”
Applause. Cheers.
Such was the general hilarity as everyone slapped backs, shook hands, found new chairs, sat back down. Which only suffered me into further confused embarrassment with more shouts of laughter. More applause.
“We will have to seat this maestro here each day to teach us social activities and life,” announced Fritz. “All right, compatriots,” cried Fritz. “To your left, young maestro, is Maggie Botwin, the finest cutter/film editor in film history!”
“Bull!”