Death Is a Lonely Business (13 page)

Shrank.

The organ music peaked. The phantom vanished. A new clip, from
Jekyll and Hyde,
1920, jittered across the screen.

I leaped down off the stage and ran up the aisle, among all the fiends and murderers.

The Poe eye in the projectionist's window was gone.

By the time I reached the projection booth, it was empty. The film unspooled itself in the firefly machine. Jekyll, on his way to becoming Hyde, slid down the lightbeams to strike a hairball on the screen.

The music stopped.

Downstairs, on the way out, I found an exhausted but happy Shapeshade back in the ticket booth, selling seats to the fog.

I thrust my hands in to grab his and squeeze.

"No bad rice for
you,
huh?"

"What!" cried Shapeshade, complimented but not knowing why.

"You'll live forever," I said.

"What do you know that God doesn't?" asked Shapeshade. "Come back later. One in the morning, Veidt in
Caligari.
Two, Chancy in
Laugh Clown Laugh.
Three,
The Gorilla.
Four,
The Bat.
Who could ask for more?"

"Not me, Mr. Shapeshade."

I moved off into the mist.

"You're not depressed?" he yelled after.

"I don't think so."

"If you got to think about it, you're not!"

Full night had arrived.

I saw that Modesti's Cafe had closed early, or forever, I didn't know which. I couldn't ask questions there about William Smith and celebratory haircuts and dinners.

The pier was dark. Only a single light shone in A. L. Shrank's tarot card shack window. I blinked. Scared, the damn light went out.

“Bad rice?" said Crumley, on the phone. But his voice was bright, hearing that it was me. "What kind of talk is that?"

"Crumley," I said, swallowing hard, "I got another name to add to our list."

"What list?"

"Along with the canary lady...”

"That's not our list, it's yours...”

"Shrank," I said.

"What!"

"A. L. Shrank, the Venice pier psychologist...”

"…Tarot card reader, weirdo librarian, amateur numerologist, Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse?"

"You know him?"

"Kid, I know everyone up, down, above, in, and under the pier, every weight lifter kicking sand, every dead bum on the night beach resurrected by the smell of seventy-nine-cent muscatel comes the dawn. A. L. Shrank, that measly dwarf? No way."

"Don't hang up! I can see it in his face. He's asking for it. He's next. I wrote a story last year, in
Dime Detective,
about two trains in a station, going opposite ways, stopped at a siding for a minute. One man looks across at another man, they trade stares, and the one man realizes he should never have looked across, because the man on the other train is a murderer. The murderer looks back and smiles. That's all. Smiles. And my hero realizes that he himself is doomed. He looks away, trying to save himself. But the other man, the killer, keeps staring. And when my hero looks up again, the train window across the way is empty. He realizes that the killer has gone to get off the train. A minute later, the killer appears on my hero's train, in his car, walks down the aisle, and sits in a seat right behind my hero. Panic, huh? Panic."

"Great idea, but it don't happen that way," said Crumley.

"More often than you think. A friend of mine drove a Rolls-Royce across country last year. On the way, he was almost run off the road six times, through Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri and Illinois, by men who resented that expensive car. If they had succeeded, it would have been murder and no one the wiser."

"That's different. An expensive car is an expensive car. They didn't care who was in it. Kill. But what you're saying is...”

"There are murderers and murderees in this world. The old man in the trolley waiting room was a murderee, so is the canary lady. It's in their eyes: take me, it said, favor me, spoil me away forever.

"Shrank," I finished. "I'd bet my life on it."

"Don't," said Crumley, suddenly quieter. "You're a good kid, but God you're wet behind the ears."

"Shrank," I said. "Now that the pier's collapsing, he's got to collapse, too. If someone doesn't kill him, he'll tie
Decline of the West
and
Anatomy of Melancholy
around his neck and jump off what's left of the far end of the pier. Shrank."

As if agreeing with me, a lion roared, hungry for blood, off in Crumley's African territory.

"Just when you and I were beginning to get along so well," said Crumley.

And hung up.

All over Venice, window-shades were going up for the first time in weeks, months, or years.

It was as if the ocean town were coming awake just before going to sleep forever.

A windowshade right across from my apartment, in a little white-flake-painted bungalow, had lifted during the day, and . . .

As I entered my apartment that night, I glanced over and was fascinated.

The eyes were staring at me.

Not just one pair, but a dozen, not a dozen but a hundred or more.

The eyes were glass and lay in shining paths or were displayed on small pedestals.

The eyes were blue and brown and green and hazel and yellow.

I walked across my narrow street and stood looking down and in at the fabulous aggie-marble display.

"What a game that would make in the schoolyard dirt," I said, just to me.

The eyes said nothing. They rested on their stands or strewn in little clusters on a white velvet cloth, fixing their gaze through and beyond me, at some cold future just over my shoulder and down my spine.

Who had made the glass eyes and who had put them in the window and who waited inside to sell them and pop them into people's sockets, I could not say.

Whoever it was was another of Venice's unseen manufacturers and salesmen. I had, on occasion, far back in the cavern reaches of this bungalow, seen a piercing blue-white flame and someone's hands working at teardrops of melting glass. But the old man (everyone is old in Venice, California) had his face hidden behind a thick metal-and-glass fire-torch mask. All you could see, far off, was a new stare coming to life, a blind eye being brought to focus in flame, to be laid out like a bright bonbon in the window next day.

Whether anyone ever came to buy this special jewelry, that also I did not know. I had never seen anyone blundering into the place or striding out with a fresher gaze. The windowshade had only been raised once or twice a month during the last year.

Looking down, I thought, strange eyes, do you see the lost canaries? and where did they go?

And added, watch my place, yes? During the night, stay alert. The weather may change. Rain may come. Shadows may touch my doorbell. Much note, please, and long remember.

The shiny agate-marble-mib long-years-ago schoolyard companions did not so much as blink.

At which point, a hand like a magician's slid from the shadows behind the display and pulled the lid down over the eyes.

It was as if the glass blower resented my staring at his stares.

Or perhaps he feared I might sneeze out one eye and come in for a refill.

A customer! That might spoil his perfect record. Ten years of blowing glass and not a single sale.

As a sideline, I wondered, does he sell bathing suits from 1910?

Back in my apartment, I glanced out.

The shade had gone back up again, now that I was not the Inquisition standing outside.

The eyes were bright and waiting.

What, I wondered, will they see tonight?

“With nothing trembles…" Instantly, I awoke.

"What," I said to the empty ceiling.

Had Lady Macbeth said that?

With nothing trembles.

To be afraid of nothing for no reason.

And having to live with that nothing until dawn.

I listened.

Was that the fog bruising my door? Was that the mist testing my keyhole? And was that the special miniature rainstorm prowling my doormat, leaving seaweed?

I was afraid to go look.

I opened my eyes. I looked at the hall which led to my two-by-four kitchen and my two-by-two Singer's Midgets bathroom.

I had hung an old torn white bathrobe there last night.

But now the robe wasn't a robe. With my glasses off and lying on the floor by my cot, my vision being what it was, almost legally blind, the robe had . . . changed.

It was the Beast.

When I was five years old, living east in Illinois, and had to go up some dark stairs in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, the Beast was always at the top of the stairs, unless the small stairwell light was lit. Sometimes my mother would forget to turn it on. I would try terribly hard to make it to the top without looking up. But always I was afraid, and I had to look up. And the Beast was always there, with the sound of the dark locomotives rushing by far out in night country, funeral trains taking dear cousins or uncles away. And stood at the bottom of the stairs and . . .

Screamed.

Now the Beast was hanging here on the edge of my door leading into darkness, the hall, the kitchen, the bathroom.

Beast, I thought, go away.

Beast, I said to the shape. I know you're not there. You're nothing. You're my old bathrobe.

The trouble was, I couldn't see it clearly.

If I could just reach my glasses, I thought, get them on, jump up.

Lying there, I was eight and then seven and then five and then four years old, getting smaller, smaller and smaller as the Beast on the door got bigger and darker and longer.

I was afraid to so much as blink. Afraid that that motion would make the Beast float softly down to ...

"Ah!" someone yelled.

Because the phone, across the street, rang.

Shut up! I thought. You'll make the Beast move.

The phone rang. Four in the morning. Four! Christ. Who…?

Peg? Trapped in a Mexican catacomb? Lost?

The phone rang.

Crumley? With an autopsy report I would hate to hear?

The phone rang.

Or a voice of cold rain and running night and raw alcohol raving in the storm and mourning terrible events, as the great train shrieked on a curve?

The phone stopped.

With my eyes clenched, my teeth gritted, the covers over my head, turned away against the sweaty pillow. I thought I heard a drifting whisper. I froze.

I kept my breath, I stopped my heart.

For, just now, at that very instant . . .

Hadn't I felt something touch and, weigh itself . . .

On the end of my bed?

A. L. Shrank was not the next victim.

Nor did the canary lady suddenly fly around her room once and expire.

Someone else vanished.

And, not long after dawn, the bright glass eyes across the street from my tired apartment saw the arrival of the evidence.

A truck pulled up outside.

Sleepless and exhausted, I heard it, stirred.

Someone knocked on my coffin door.

I managed to levitate and balloon-drift over to crack the door and peer gum-eyed into the face of a great beefy ox. The face named me, I assented to the name, the ox told me to sign here, I signed something that looked like a D.O.A. slip and watched the delivery man hoof back to his half-truck and wrestle a familiar, bundled object off the back and wheel it along the walk.

"My God," I said. "What is it? Who...?”

But the big rolling bundle struck the doorjamb and gave off a musical chord. I slumped, knowing the answer.

"Where do you want it?" said the ox, glancing around Groucho Marx's overcrowded stateroom. "This as good as any?"

He heaved the wrapped object to one side against the wall, looked around with contempt at my Goodwill sofa, my rugless floor, and my typewriter, and cattle-trotted back out to his truck, leaving the door wide.

Over the way, I saw the ten dozen bright blue, brown, hazel glass eyes watching, even as I ripped away the covering to stare at ...

The Smile.

"My God!" I cried. "That's the piano that I heard playing...”

The "Maple Leaf Rag."

Wham. The truck door slammed. The truck roared away.

I collapsed on my already collapsed sofa, totally disbelieving that big, vacant, ivory smile.

Crumley, I said in my mind. I felt the lousy haircut too high in back, too short on the sides. My fingers were numb.

Yeah, kid? said Crumley.