Read Online The Cat's Pajamas by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online

supposed to be a party, but he died in a fall. So instead of canceling, they fetched the body. Now it’s a semi-mass, with candles and choirs in lace.”
    â€œJesus!” I said.
    â€œYou can say that again.”
    â€œJesus. A funeral mass for an unknown artist in a fourthrate gallery in Mexican-Hispanic-Jewish Boyle Heights?”
    â€œTurn the pages. The ghosts of Orozco and Siqueiros are there.”
    I turned the pages and gasped.
    â€œHoly mackerel!”
    â€œYou can say that again,” said Sam.
    Â 
    O N THE FREEWAY heading to Jewish-Hispanic Boyle Heights I gibbered.
    â€œThis guy’s a genius! How did you find him?”
    â€œThe police,” said Sam, driving.
    â€œThe what ?”
    â€œCops. He was a criminal. A few hours in jail.”
    â€œHours? What had he done?”
    â€œBig stuff. Mind-blowing. But no reason to be stuffed in the slammer. Big in one way, small in another. Look up!”
    I looked up.
    â€œSee that overhead?”
    â€œThe bridge? Now it’s behind us! Why—?”
    â€œThat’s where he fell.”
    â€œJumped?”
    â€œNo, fell.” Sam speeded up. “Notice anything else?”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œThe overhead. The bridge.”
    â€œWhat was I supposed to notice? You went too fast.”
    â€œWe’ll come back later. You’ll see.”
    â€œWhere he died?”
    â€œWhere he had his finest hour. Then died.”
    â€œWhere he was Orozco, Siqueiros’s ghosts?”
    â€œYou got it!”
    Sam wheeled off the freeway.
    â€œWe’re here!”
    Â 
    I T WAS NOT AN ART GALLERY .
    It was a church.
    There were bright pictures on all the walls, each so stunning in their brilliance they seemed to leap on the air in flames. But other flames intervened. Two or three hundred candles flared in a great circle around the vast gallery. They had been lit for hours, and their flames made it high summer, so you forgot you had just come in from April.
    The artist was there but concerned with his new occupation, an eternity to be filled with silence.
    He was not fixed in a coffin but laid out on a cloud embankment of snow-white cloth, which seemed to drift him up through the constellations of candles that now trembled in a draft from a side door where a member of the clergy had just entered.
    I recognized the face immediately. Carlos Jesus Montoya, keeper of a great sheepfold of Latinos overlapping the dry bed of the empty Los Angeles River. Priest, poet, adventurer in rain forests, love assassin of ten thousand women, headliner, mystic, and now critic for Art News Quarterly, he stood as on the prow of a craft sinking in flames to survey the walls where Sebastian Rodriguez’s lost dreams were suspended.
    I looked where he looked and sucked air.
    â€œWhat?” Sam whispered.
    â€œThese paintings,” I said, my voice rising, “are not paintings. They’re color photographs!”
    â€œSh!” someone shhed.
    â€œPipe down,” Sam whispered.
    â€œBut—”
    â€œIt was all planned.” Sam glanced around nervously. “First the photos to pique the viewers’ curiosity. Then the real paintings. A double art premiere.”
    â€œStill,” I said. “For photos, they’re brilliant!”
    â€œSh,” someone shhed even louder.
    The great Montoya was staring at me from across a sea of summer fire.
    â€œBrilliant photos,” I whispered.
    Montoya read my lips and nodded with majesty, like a torero on a Seville afternoon.
    â€œHold on!” I said, almost grasping something. “Those pictures. I’ve seen them somewhere else!”
    Carlos Jesus Montoya refixed his stare at the walls.
    â€œCome on,” hissed Sam and pulled me toward the door.
    â€œWait!” I said. “Don’t break my chain of thought.”
    â€œIdiot,” Sam almost cried, “you’ll get yourself killed.”
    Montoya read his lips too and