"Let's All Kill Constance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray Douglas)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE phone rang. I picked it up as if it were red-hot.

"Is that the Martian?" a voice said.

"Henry!" I cried.

"That's me," the voice said. "It's crazy, but I miss you, son. Kinda dumb, a colored saying that to an ethnic flying-saucer pilot."

"I've never heard better," I said, choking up.

"Hell," said Henry, "if you start crying, I'm gone."

"Don't," I sniffled. "Oh God, Henry, how fine it is to hear your voice!"

"Which means you've milked the cow and got a bucket of I-won't-say. You want me polite or impolite?"

"Both, Henry. Things are nuts. Maggie's back east. I got Crumley here, of course, but-"

"Which means you need a blind man to find your way out of a cowshed full of cowsheds, right? Hell, let me get my hankie." He blew his nose. "How soon do you need this all-seeing nose?"

"Yesterday."

"I'm there now! Hollywood, visiting some poor black trash."

"You know Grauman's Chinese?"

"Hell, yes!"

"How quickly can you meet me there?"

"As quick as you want, son. I'll be standing in Bill Robinson's tap-dancer shoes. Do we visit another graveyard?"

"Almost."

I called Crumley to say where I was going, that I might be late getting to Rattigan's, but that I'd be bringing Henry with me.

"The blind leading the blind," he said.