Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (7 page)

“I like it,” I said.

“It's a strange movie,” said Roloff pushing his cup away and fiddling with his pipe. “Depending on who views it and what's going on in his or her life, it can be a lot of things.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“It's a child's dream of accepting the adult world. A girl at puberty dreams of seeking the aid of a magical wizard, aided by three male figures, each not quite a man. Her jealous rival is an old witch who wants the slippers the girl wears. The ruby red slippers can be seen as a menstrual sign. In the book they were silver. The girl in the movie learns to accept power of the ruby slippers – her womanhood – with the help of three flawed male admirers and a mysterious frightening father figure. The slippers are given to her by a mother figure, a beautiful witch. Did you ever think of having her wake up and find she's had her first period, Victor?”

Fleming laughed.

“I had no such interpretation in mind when I made the movie and neither did anyone else who worked on it,” Fleming said.

Roloff lit his pipe and puffed a few times. Then he raised his hand.

“That's just the point I was making about the Jekyll film,” he said. “It doesn't matter if it is consciously in your mind. A dream doesn't necessarily have a conscious meaning. You simply tell the story because you find it interesting and others do, too. My job is to find out why you find it interesting and what it means.”

“You said there were other interpretations,” I said.

“Well,” Roloff said, “how about this one? A lot of people may be reacting to the film as a kind of parallel to the current world situation. If we see the Munchkins as the Europeans, foreign, different, in need of help, and the witch as Hitler, we have a situation in which an All-American girl is forced to take up arms against evil, to help the innocent foreigners, to destroy the well guarded militant Hitler-Witch and to be rewarded in her effort by the human-father-God, the Wizard of Oz.”

“But it turns out to be only a dream,” Fleming said shaking his head and motioning to the waiter for more coffee. This time I took some.

“Right,” said Roloff, “it's just a dream, to a great extent a nightmare with a happy ending. The film says if we have to enter the war, we will and we will triumph to return from it as if from a dream. Perhaps we will have to face the fear of death in a colorful and far off place before we can return to the dull security of Kansas. In any case, the message might simply be, if we have to handle it we can. Would you like another possible meaning?”

I smiled and said two were quite enough, and Fleming said if we weren't careful, colleges would start teaching courses about the “meaning” of movies. What Roloff said was interesting, but I didn't see any way I could use it. I was wrong, but I wouldn't find out till it was almost too late. As far as I was concerned, the meeting with Fleming provided nothing.

“Sorry again I couldn't be of more help, Peters,” Fleming said. “Clark paid some attention to the incident, and he has a hell of a memory. He might be able to give you more.”

I said goodby to Roloff and Fleming and left the Derby. It was after nine. I stopped at a stand for two tacos and a chocolate shake.

A year, several thousand memories, and a dozen broken bones ago I had seen The Wizard of Oz. It had been on one of those nights when I was feeling sorry for myself. There had been nothing on the radio and nothing to read. I decided to see the movie again. I wanted to try to pick out Cash and Grundy, wanted to look at Judy Garland and see if she had changed as much as I thought.

I stopped at a newsstand and got a Times. The picture wasn't playing anywhere. I was going to give up and head home, but I didn't want to think about what or who might be looking for me at home. I had to see The Wizard of Oz.

I called Warren Hoff at home. He answered and told me I didn't need to see the picture. I suggested that he handle the publicity business and I'd handle the detective business, and both of us would probably meet at the funny farm. He said he'd set up a screening in the morning. I pushed, for the moon was high, my blood was up and I had no lead to follow.

“Wait,” said Hoff. “I've got an idea.” He put the phone down, and I looked out of the booth at a thin blonde woman in a grey suit. She caught me looking and stared me down. I pretended to start talking even before Hoff came back.

“Right,” I said.

“What's right?” said Hoff.

“I don't know,” I said. “What did you find?”

“There's a charity screening of the picture tonight,” I could hear him crunching through some papers. “I've got a list of extra screenings on.… here it is. Holy Name Church of God's Friends in Van Nuys, on Van Nuys just South of Victory.”

“I know the place,” I said. “What time?”

“Nine thirty. Enjoy yourself.” He hung up.

I drove in the dark listening to the end of the San Jose-Loyola game. San Jose won 27 to 12 and a back named Gene Grady ran ninety-seven yards for a touchdown.

The Church was where I remembered it. A few years before I had waited for a bus outside of that church for an hour listening to a skinny woman with a red wig tell me her life story. It was a hell of a sad life. I remember her face when the rain came down in the middle of her tale about a draining liver.

“See,” she had said shaking her head knowingly. The rain had been another proof of the hell of her life. She didn't seem to notice that the rain was falling on me too.

The Holy Name Church of God's Friends was a four story red brick building with a big sign. When I stepped through the thick wooden doors I could tell what kind of church it was. The ceiling went up about ten feet and I didn't see any second floor. The front of the church was a façade, a store front, a prop to make it look as if the church went up four stories, three closer to God than the truth. I wondered who the people of the church were trying to fool. God or the street trade. I didn't much care.

A guy with a thick, white turned-around collar greeted me at the door. He had red cheeks and messy white hair. He looked like a priest.

“You're a little late,” he whispered. “The short is already on.”

I gave him a nod and headed for the door in front of me and behind him. He touched my hand gently.

“We would appreciate a donation to the church,” he said humbly.

“And if I don't want to give a donation?”

“Well,” he whispered, “I'll just call a few people and throw your ass out of here.” The benevolent look never left his face.

I smiled and coughed up a buck. He took it and stuffed it in his pocket.

“Enjoy the movie, son,” he said.

“Thank you father,” I said.

“No,” he corrected, “in this church I am called Friend, Friend Yoder.”

I left him standing in the hall and stepped into the dark room. I couldn't see much except the beam of light from the projector and restless shadows. The projector grinded, feet shuffled, old women coughed and a baby revved up for a hell of a cry.

The short was an English thing about a train carrying mail to Scotland. I watched for a minute or two while my eyes got used to the dark. An English narrator was reading a poem about postal orders. It sounded kind of sing-songy. It had something to do with carrying mail and how great it was. I found a wooden seat next to a woman holding a kid who couldn't have been more than three. I couldn't tell if the kid was a boy or a girl, but I could tell that someone should have wiped his nose when he was two.

I played goo with the kid till the picture ended. The lights went on and I could see the place was crowded, mostly with old people and a couple of women with kids falling asleep or trying to get away from the arms that held them. I moved to another seat near the front and the kid at my side whined. The old man next to me smiled. I smiled back, and the picture started.

The old man chuckled when the Bert Lahr character Zeke told a pig to get in the pen before he made a dime bank out of him. No one else chuckled. Things picked up when Dorothy got to Munchkinland. I recognized the set and the soldier costume on a bunch of midgets marching. They all looked the same to me.

When the wicked witch said, “Just try to stay out of my way,” the blond kid with the nose let out a scream of terror. His mother told him to shut up.

In a few minutes, Dorothy observed that, “People come and go so quickly here.” It was the problem I was facing.

The blond kid got uncomfortable again when the trees talked, and I got uncomfortable when the Scarecrow observed that, “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.”

I got sleepy when the group hit the poppy field and felt like going home when the movie ended with Dorothy saying “There's no place like home.” Then the lights went on and I remembered where I lived.

I dodged past old people and women with kids and nodded to Reverend Yoder as I pushed open the front door and went out onto Van Nuys.

When I reached home thirty minutes later, I locked my door, pulled down the shades, propped a chair under the door-knob and put my .38 under the pillow. It wasn't likely that a reasonable killer would break in here and take a few shots at me, but it was possible that a murderous midget who knew my address might just be wild enough to try it. For some reason, the prospect of being shot by a midget scared me more than the idea of the same thing being done by a normal size man. What if the little killer crept in through a crack under the door and plunked a knife into my chest? I could see the dead soldier Munchkin and me lying side by side on the yellow brick road.

I had a hard time getting to sleep so I left the light on in the bathroom. It had worked when I was a kid, and it helped now. No one would ever know. The radio was glowing next to me and singing softly. My hand felt the comforting steel of the .38 under my pillow, and I fell asleep expecting nightmares.

There were no nightmares. I dreamed I was sleeping peacefully in a field of poppies, and snow was falling coldly and gently on my face.

4

The radio was purring softly in my ear, and a band of light was dancing across my face from a slit in the shade of the single window in my livingroom-bedroom. I felt like turning over for a few more hours, but I had a busy day planned and fifty bucks to earn, probably the hard way.

I turned off the radio and padded my way to the bathroom carrying my .38. I kept the gun on the toilet seat while I brushed my teeth and shaved with a Gilette Blue Blade, the sharpest edge ever honed. I cut myself twice. After coffee and a mixed bowl of puffed rice and shredded wheat, I looked up an address in the phone book, got dressed, plunked my .38 in the holster inside my jacket, pushed my hat back at what I considered a rakish angle and went out into the sun.

My hillbilly neighbors had stopped feuding, and the day was clear. There wasn't enough time to get my windows fixed so I left them rolled down and headed for the office of Barney Grundy, the photographer who had witnessed the fight between the two midgets at Metro the morning before. I got to the corner of Melrose and Highland without anyone trying to kill me and found a parking spot a block from where I was going.

Grundy's address was on a doorway between an auto parts store and a travel bureau His place was up the stairs behind a door marked “B. Nimble Grundy, Pictures Still and Moving.” The lettering was in pink against a yellow square. I knocked, prepared for almost anything, but I wasn't prepared for what opened the door. He was about six foot three with bleached, yellow hair that would have been called white on an older man. He wore a blue tee shirt and black slacks and was drying his hands with a small towel. He was deeply tanned and remarkable. He looked like a caricature of Tarzan. His muscles were enormous and bulging with veins. His tee shirt could hardly contain him, which was probably why he wore it. I thought of asking if there was a man inside the mannikin before me, but I wasn't sure if he would take it as a joke, and I didn't want to get started on the wrong foot.

“Barney Grundy?” I asked.

He put out his hand and grinned. It was an infectious boyish grin and his grasp was firm but not bone-breaking. I had a feeling that he was holding back out of politeness. A second look told me he wasn't as young as he first appeared. I would have taken him for mid-twenties with a first look. I added ten years to the estimate on second look.

“You must be Peters,” he said standing back to let me in. “Mr. Hoff told me you might want to talk. Come on in.”

I came on in. There were photographs on the wall in the wide room. The wall was filled with them. Most of them were women, big prints, framed and mounted. I recognized a few of the women as movie stars and almost stars. There was no carpet on the finely polished wooden floor, and the furniture was minimal. The room was clean and bright. Three stairs led up to another level that looked like a combination livingroom-bedroom, and kitchen. There were a couple of doors beyond it where I guessed he did his work.

“Hey, listen,” Grundy said in a soft tenor, “I was on the way out to get some breakfast. You want to come with me?”

I said yes, and he put his towel carefully over a chair and led the way out.

“You're in good shape,” I said as we went down the stairs.

“I work out every day for an hour or two with weights in a place down in Santa Monica,” he explained leading the way out. “There are about a dozen of us. It's a kind of competition to see who can develop the best muscle tone.”

We walked down Melrose to LaBrea and I asked,

“Don't you get musclebound?”

“No,” he grinned, “that's something made up by people who don't know what they're talking about. I can run a six minute mile, touch my nose with my big toe and please ladies. You look like you're in fair shape yourself.”

“Y.M.C.A.,” I said. “I run a little and play handball.”

I didn't add that my total miles per week had dropped to five and my handball partner was a sixty-year-old doctor who was well ahead of me in games, but a damn good player.