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“How about passing through?” offered Roy “Any funerals?”

“Funerals! You think I wouldn’t notice? Wait!” He flashed his ate and then toward the backlot “Du it was deMille’s hearse and we could celebrate It went that way!”

“Are they fil a burial here today?”

“On every sound stage: turkeys, catatonic actors, English funeral directors whose heavy paould stillbirth a whale! Halloween, yesterday, yes? And today the true Mexican Day of Death, November 1st, so why should it be different at Maximus Films? Where did you find this terrible wreck of a car, Mr Holdstrom?”

“This,” Roy said, like Edgar Kennedy doing a slow burn in an old Hal Roach comedy, “is the car in which Laurel and Hardy sold fish in that two reeler in 1930 Cost me fifty bucks, plus seventy to repaint Stand back, sir!”

Fritz Wong, delighted with Roy, jumped back “In one hour, Martian The commissary! Be there!”

We steamed on amidst the noon crowd Roy wheeled us around a corner toward Springfield, Illinois, lower Manhattan, and Piccadilly

“You knohere you’re going?” I asked

“Hell, a studio’s a great place to hide a body Who would notice? On a backlot filled with Abyssinians, Greeks, Chicagoith forty Sousa bands and nobody’d sneeze! That body, chuht about here!”

And we dusted around the last corner into Tombstone, Arizona

“Nice name for a town,” said Roy

10

There was a warh Noon We were surrounded by a thousand footprints in backlot dust Soed to Too I let the wind blowthe hot dust Of course the prints hadn’t stayed, dust doesn’t keep, and even John Wayne’s big strides were long since sifted off, even as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s sandal marks had vanished from the shore of the Sea of Galilee just one hundred yards over on Lot 12 Nevertheless, the secoach would pull in soon with a new load of scripts, and a fresh batch of riflemen cow pokes I was not about to refuse the quiet joy of just sitting here in the old Laurel and Hardy flivver, looking over at the Civil War locoot stoked up twice a year and beca hi him home

But at last I said, “What makes you so sure the body’s here?”

“Hell” Roy kicked the floorboards like Gary Cooper once kicked cow chips “Look close at those buildings”