“Right, right,” said Academy, sinking back into his chair and trying to hide.
“My secretary will be in the lobby as you leave with written information on the New Whig Party, membership applications, and answers to questions you may have. Now, if you will put your heads down, we will have a full minute of silent non-denominational prayer.”
Lyle looked at everyone in the auditorium as he clapped his hands and heads went down, even mine, Jeremy’s, Dolmitz’s, and the cowered sandwich man’s in the first row a few feet from Bass.
Head down, eyes closed, I whispered to Jeremy, “You going to join the Whigs?”
“The line between dedication and madness is as thin as the space between two thoughts,” said Jeremy. “The madman who bears away our faith is labeled a saint and the saint who fails to gather our faith is labeled mad.”
“And?” I said, eyes still down, listening beyond Jeremy’s voice to shuffling feet and clearing thoughts.
“And,” he said, “you had best open your eyes and see where your moment of feigned faith has brought you.”
I opened my eyes and looked up at nothing The stage was empty. Lyle and Bass were gone. Jeremy was already in the aisle. I joined him noisily and eyes opened around us. When others saw that Lyle and Bass were gone they headed for the exit. I almost collided with the sandwich man, since I was going in the opposite direction.
Jeremy leaped on the stage. I was a beat behind him. He went for the curtain, pulled it open and disappeared behind it. I followed, finding myself in the darkness feeling my way across the movie screen on which Olivia de Havilland would soon be pining away. I followed the sound of Jeremy’s feet going to the right and, at the right side of the screen, found a small door and stepped through.
Jeremy was ahead of me, standing on the cement floor in a room behind the screen. Light was coming in through a dirty window. The room was a storage area: tables, old theater seats, boxes of light bulbs and electrical equipment, sacks of popping corn, a pile of movie posters, and a box of lobby cards. A few of the cards in sickly colors, with Lash Larue and Fuzzy St. John looking up at me, were on the floor. All very interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the wire cage in the corner, the door of which stood open. There was a small bowl of water in the cage and a general faint smell of dog.
I found the door to the outside before Jeremy. It was behind a painted Chinese screen with a gold dragon. It was a double door and I pushed it open with Jeremy at my side. We were in the back of the theater. The gravel parking lot was to our right. We ran the few steps and turned the corner in time to see Lyle’s Chrysler shooting little rocks from its rear tires as it hit the driveway, almost hit a woman and a small boy, and barely make it into traffic in front of a delivery truck.
Jeremy and I ran for my car and lost additional time as Jeremy slid across the driver’s seat and I followed him. By the time we pulled into traffic on Reseda a few seconds later, Lyle and Bass were out of sight.
“You got a suggestion?” I asked Jeremy, who sat placidly, eyes forward, thinking about a poem or another world, or a rematch with Bass.
“Intuition,” he said. “Let your hands tell you. Let your mind go.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You have a better plan?” He smiled.
I smiled back. “I’m taking a chance that he likes the same big streets and doesn’t know we followed him to the theater,” I said. “I’ll cut ahead of him on Sepulveda.”
Five minutes later I was cruising south on Sepulveda when Jeremy said softly, “Ahead, about two blocks.”
I didn’t see anything, but I trusted his eyes and kept going. Before we hit the hills, I spotted the Chrysler, slowed down, and kept my distance, trying not to think about how much gas I had left. Fifteen minutes later, we hit downtown Los Angeles. I reached over to turn on the radio but I changed my mind. Jeremy was not a radio fan.
Lyle and Bass drove down Broadway to Central, took Ninth across to Long Beach Road, and then went down Long Beach to Slauson Avenue. They pulled into a dirt driveway next to something that looked like an old warehouse just off Holmes Avenue across from the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. I parked half a block ahead and looked back to see them getting out of the Chrysler. The clouds had rolled in and were rumbling as Bass and Lyle moved to the trunk of their car, opened it, and removed a wooden crate that Bass hoisted to his shoulder.
They took the crate into the warehouse and just as I was deciding to follow them, they reappeared without it and got back into the car.
“Jeremy,” I said, getting out of the car. “Stay with them. I’m going to find out if they just delivered what I think they delivered.”
Jeremy nodded and, with great difficulty, squeezed himself behind the wheel.
“I’ll make my own way back to the office,” I shouted as he made a U-turn and darted off after the Chrysler, which was now a good block away.
The sky broke and the rain began to come down. I ran across Slauson ahead of a truck and found the door Bass and Lyle had gone through. Behind and above me, a tidal wave fell, sending up a wet dusty smell that lasted only a second or two.
The building was a gigantic warehouse. Beyond a pile of ceiling-high shelves filled with wooden crates I could hear voices. People were arguing. Murder seemed to be in progress. I moved slowly along the shelves toward the sound and turned a corner.
A pretty young woman with too much make-up and a ribbon in her hair and a man with a thin mustache and sagging jaw each had an end of rope that was tied around the neck of a man who looked slightly bewildered. They pulled and shouted and the man in the middle gulped, the center knot of a strange, deadly tug of war.
Then a voice called out, “Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Damn it, cut.”
That was when I saw, beyond the bright lights blasting down on the trio of actors, a camera and a small group of people.
The man who had shouted “Cut” had a light mustache, a receding hairline, and wore no shirt. A towel was draped around his neck.
“What’s wrong, Jules?” asked the man who had been holding one end of the rope.
“The noise,” said Jules, pointing over his shoulder to the ceiling. “It’s raining. We can’t do sound in here with that.” Jules put his hands on his hips and shook his head.
“Let’s shoot the scene silent,” said the man who was being strangled, the rope still around his neck. “Cut to a close-up of me and we can add rattling sounds later. You know, like my brains are getting scrambled. Then we do a point of view shot and I can see them moving their mouths, but the rope is so tight around my neck that it’s cutting off my hearing.”
Jules turned, thought about it, shrugged and said, “It’ll do, Buster.”
Buster Keaton, who had made the suggestion, put the rope ends back in the hands of the two actors and began supervising his own mock strangulation. He put his tiny hat on the side of his head and said, “Let’s move the camera in and get going.”
The camera operator said something I couldn’t make out, and Jules called to the actors. “Don’s having some problem with the camera. Let’s take a lunch break.”
Keaton took off his hat, removed the rope, shook himself off, and started to walk toward a door in the corner. A lighting man turned off the lights and I moved across the set, apparently a living room, and followed Keaton.
“Mr. Keaton,” I called, catching up to him as he turned. There was no expression on his face as I stepped up. There wasn’t any through our whole conversation. I was a few inches taller than he was and he was a few years older than I had fixed him in my mind. The dead-pan look I remembered from his silent movies was there, but the smooth face had turned to leather, covered by unconvincing light makeup.