At this memory of her employer’s expressed fear, the faithful housekeeper – and, according to the historical record, highly skilled bird mimic – looked up at the ceiling. She did not actually expect to find the handsome mahogany coffers splattered with gray matter, for she assumed that the actor had been speaking metaphorically, with that free and supple imagination that actors do not naturally possess but which he might have acquired by hanging around with a bunch of screenwriters, who do possess it, though not to the degree that you’ll find it in novelists. Instead, she discovered that he must have meant to be taken literally. Not merely his head had exploded, but seemingly his entire physical entity, which now festooned the library ceiling in glutinous swags that were decidedly not an improvement to the decor.
Within half an hour, more than twenty police vehicles crowded the circular driveway in front of the mansion, and the cobblestones were littered with shards of glass from the automobile headlamps that had shattered under the assault of cheese stench. In the great house, uniformed and plainclothes personnel, noses wisely pinned, puzzled over the meager evidence and vigorously debated whether the victim should be scraped off the ceiling or sucked off with an industrial vacuum cleaner, or simply painted over.
According to the official report of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of Los Angeles, whose business card had to be unusually long to accommodate his full title, the cause of death was “forces unknown and unknowable, of perhaps a supernatural nature, but at the very least damned peculiar. Even a medical scientist trained in forensic investigation is left with a palpable sense of dread and a desire to move back home with Mommy.” The same report described the remains as “monumentally icky,” and “too repellently grotesque to be depicted in a motion picture for at least another sixty years or until Quentin Tarantino is allowed to direct, whichever comes first.”
The following morning, in the Los Angeles Times’ front-page story, no mention was made of Langford Crispin’s Academy Award for his performance as Jerry Jekyll, but he was described as “the actor who, in The Private Life of Henry the VIII, chose to play Lord Havingstoke as a mincing, one-armed, twelve-toed tyrant in a funny hat and elfin shoes, in total disregard of the wishes of the film’s director and in spite of much advice to the contrary provided by a consulting board of 312 prominent and deadly serious historians.” Los Angeles is a hard, cruel town.
The Book of Counted Sorrows was sold with the other volumes in Langford’s extensive book collection. The purchaser was a rare-book dealer named Ed Thomas, from Orange County, who at that time operated out of a former burlesque house that had been stripped of its seating and its strippers, and that boasted one of the odder smells of any book shop of its era. This Ed Thomas is not to be confused with the Ed Thomas to whom – with his wife, Pat – I dedicated my novel Midnight. The Ed Thomas who purchased Langford Crispin’s library from the actor’s estate was 58 years old in 1934, which would make him 125 as I write this. Even if my dear friend Ed Thomas looked 125, which he pretty much does not, he could not possibly be the same man who acquired The Book of Counted Sorrows with the rest of Langford’s collection, because in 1942, that Ed Thomas was run down by a 30,000-pound Acme steamroller driven – according to witnesses – by a coyote.
For a while, The Book of Counted Sorrows fell into hands unknown before surfacing, in 1938, in the possession of a doomed poet by the name of Addison Heffalope.
Now excuse me while I pause to eat a cracker, drink a lemon beer, floss my teeth, present the floss to Skippy at the carriage master’s cottage, obtain my receipt, witness the tying, sign the appropriate legal forms, visit the bathroom, complete an entry in the official 1avatory log, wash my hands with three soaps, finishing with Aunt Jemima’s Maximum-Power Lye Cake, present my hands to Mrs. Scuttlesby for inspection, and return here to the study, wonderfully refreshed.