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could.
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    VI. Umney's Last Case.
    On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look
    at the woman on the corner, who
    was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a
    momentary length of beautiful
    leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy
    was holding out his battered old
    baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating
    six feet above the street like a ghost
    called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from
    Peoria Smith's overturned table.
    Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold,
    the recently deceased Cuban
    bandleader below it.
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    Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off.
    `Àt first I thought that meant I'd be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward,
    thinking I was you, but that was all
    right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you
    see? And then, gradually, I began
    to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way
    I could actually . . . well . . . slip all
    the way in. And do you know what the key was?''
    ``Yes,'' I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget
    revolved, and suddenly the
    newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two
    later an old DeSoto rolled
    jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the
    baseball glove, and both he and
    the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled
    halfway to the gutter, then froze solid
    again.
    ``You do?'' He sounded surprised.
    ``Yeah. Peoria was the key.''
    ``That's right.'' He laughed, then cleared his throat--nervous sounds, both of them.
    `Ì keep forgetting that you're me.''
    It was a luxury I didn't have.
    `Ì was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter
    One six different ways to Sunday
    before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.''
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    That made me swing around in a hurry. ``The hell you say!''
    `Ì didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all
    along. I don't want to convene the lit
    class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade--writing stories in the
    first person is a funny, tricky
    business. It's as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a
    series of letters or dispatches from
    some far-off battle zone. It's very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this
    case I did. It was as if your little part
    of Sunset Boulevard were the Garden of Eden--''
    `Ì never heard it called that before,'' I remarked.
    ``--and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria
    Smith.''
    Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken,
    although the sky was cloudless. The
    Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment
    there was just a hole where it
    had been, and then a new building filled it--a restaurant called Petit Déjeuner with a
    window full of ferns. I glanced up
    the street and saw that other changes were going on--new buildings were replacing old
    ones with silent, spooky speed.
    They meant I was running out of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew something
    else, as well--there was probably
    not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. When God walks into your office and
    tells you He's decided he likes
    your life better than His own, what the hell are your options?
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