Death Is a Lonely Business (21 page)

"I believe that," I said.

"Your honesty will be your death."

He put his photo, like a flower, in his pocket.

"You still don't believe."

"Let me see that again."

He handed it to me.

I stared. And as I stared, the surf rolled on the dark shore just last night.

From the surf, a naked man suddenly appeared.

I winced and blinked.

Was this the body, this the man who had come out of the sea to frighten me when Constance Rattigan's back was turned?

I wanted to know. I could only say, "Do you know Constance Rattigan?"

He stiffened. "Why do you ask?"

"I saw her name at Shrank's outside, typed. I thought maybe you were ships that passed in the night."

Or bodies? Him coming out of the surf at three a.m. some night soon, as she plunged in?

His Teutonic mouth shaped itself to merely haughty.

"Our film
Crossed Sabers
was the smash of 1926 across America. Our affair made headlines that summer. I was the greatest love of her life."

"Were you...” I started to say. Were you the one, I thought, and not the director who drowned himself, who cut her hamstrings with your sword, so she couldn't walk for a year?

But then, last night, I hadn't really had a chance to look for the scars. And the way Constance ran, it was all lies told a hundred years back.

"You should go see A. L. Shrank, a concerned man, pure Zen, all wise," he said, climbing back on his bike. "How so? He told me to give you these."

He took from his other pocket a handful of candy wrappers, twelve of them, neatly paperclipped together, mostly Clark, Crunch, and Power House. Things I had mindlessly strewn in the beach winds and someone had picked up.

"He knows
all
about you," said Mad Otto of Bavaria, and laughed with the soundtrack off.

I took the candy wrappers shamefacedly, and felt the extra ten pounds sag around my middle as I held these flags of defeat.

"Visit me," he said. "Come ride the carousel. Come see if innocent boy David is truly married to old evil Caligula, eh?"

And he biked away, a tweed suit under a tweed hat, smiling and looking only ahead.

I walked back to A. L. Shrank's melancholy museum and squinted through the dusty window.

There was a toppling stack of bright orange, lemon, chocolate-brown candy wrappers filed on a small table near the sunken sofa.

Those can't
all
be mine, I thought.

They are, I thought. I'm plump. But then, he's
nuts.

I went to find ice cream.

“Crumley?"
    

"I thought my name was Offisa Pup."

"I think I've got a line on the murderer himself!"

There was a long ocean silence while the policeman put down the phone, tore his hair, and picked the phone up again.

"John Wilkes Hopwood," I said.

"You forget," said the police lieutenant, "there have been no murders yet. Only suspicions and possibilities. There's a thing called a courtroom and another thing called proof. No proof, no case, and they throw you out on your butt so fast you're stopped up for weeks!"

"You ever seen John Wilkes Hopwood with his clothes off?" I asked.

"That did it."

Offisa Pup hung up on me.

It was raining when I came out of the booth.

Almost immediately the telephone rang as if knowing I was there. I snatched at it and for some reason yelled, "Peg!"

But there was only a sound of rain, and soft breathing, miles away.

I won't ever answer this phone again, I thought.

"Son-of-a-bitch," I yelled. "Come get me, you bastard."

I hung up.

My God, I thought, what if he heard and came over to visit?

Idiot, I thought.

And the phone rang for a last time.

I had to answer, maybe to apologize to that breathing far away and tell it to ignore my insolence.

I lifted the receiver.

And heard a sad lady five miles off somewhere in Los Angeles. Fannie. And she was crying.

“Fannie, my God, is that you?"

"Yes, oh, yes, Lord God in heaven," she wheezed, she gasped, she floundered. "Coming upstairs almost killed me. Haven't climbed stairs since 1935. Where have you been? The roofs caved in. Life's over. Everybody's dead. Why didn't you tell me? Oh, God, God, this is terrible. Can you come over? Jimmy. Sam. Pietro." She did the litany and the pressure of my guilt crushed me against the side of the phone booth. "Pietro, Jimmy, Sam. Why did you lie?"

"I didn't lie, I just shut up!" I said.

"And now Henry!" she cried.

"Henry! My God. He isn't…?"

"Fell downstairs."

"Alive? Alive?" I yelled.

"In his room, yes, thank God. Wouldn't go to the hospital. I heard him fall, ran out. That's when I found out what you didn't say. Henry lying there, swearing, naming names. Jimmy. Sam. Pietro. Oh, why did you bring death here?"

"I didn't, Fannie."

"Come prove it. I've got three mayonnaise jars full of quarters. Take a cab, send the driver up, I'll pay him out of the jars! And when you get here, how will I know when you knock at the door it'll be you?"

"How do you know it's me, even now, Fannie, on the phone?"

"I don't know," she wailed. "Isn't that awful? I don't know."

"Los Angeles," I said to the taxi driver, ten minutes later. "Three mayonnaise jars' worth."

“Hello, Constance? I'm in a phone booth across from Fannie's. We've got to get her out of here. Can you come? She's really scared now."

"For good reasons?"

I stared across at the tenement and judged how many thousand shadows were crammed in it, top to bottom.

"This time for sure."

"Get over there. Stand guard. I'll be there in half an hour. I won't come up. You argue her down, damn it, and we'll get her away. Jump."

The way Constance slammed down the phone shot me out of the booth and almost got me run down by a car racing across the street.

The way I knocked on her door, she believed it was me. She threw the door wide and I saw what was almost a crazed elephant, eyes wild, hair in disarray, acting as if a rifle had just shot her through her head.

I launched her back into her chair and threw the icebox wide, trying to decide whether mayonnaise or wine would help. Wine.

"Get that in you," I commanded, and suddenly realized my cab driver was in the door behind me, having followed me upstairs, thinking I was a deadbeat and trying to escape.

I grabbed and handed him one mayonnaise jar full of quarters.

"That enough?" I said.

He did a quick estimate, like someone guessing jelly beans in a vat in a store window, sucked his teeth, and ran off with the coins rattling.

Fannie was busy emptying the wine glass. I refilled it and sat down to wait. At last she said, "Someone's been outside my door every night now for two nights. They come and go, go and come, not like ever before, they stop, they breathe out and in, my God, what are they doing outside an old collapsed ruin of an opera singer fat lady's door at midnight, it can't be rape, can it, they don't rape 38o-pound sopranos, do they?"

And here she began to laugh so long and so hard I couldn't tell if it was hysteria or an amazed and self-surprising humor. I had to beat her on the back to stop the laughs and change the color in her face and give her more wine.

"Oh, my, my, my," she gasped. "It's good to laugh. Thank God, you're here. You'll protect me, won't you? I'm sorry I said what I said. You didn't bring that dreadful thing with you and leave it outside my door. It's just the hound of the Baskervilles, hungry, come in on his own to scare Fannie."

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Jimmy and Pietro and Sam, Fannie," I said, and gulped my wine. "I just didn't want to read obits to you, all at once. Look here. Constance Rattigan will be downstairs in a few minutes. She wants you to come stay a few days and…"

"More secrets," cried Fannie, eyes wide. "Since when have you known her? And, anyway, it's no use. This is my home. If I left here, I'd waste away, just die. I have my recordings."

"We'll take them with."

"My books."

"I'll carry them down."

"My mayonnaise, she wouldn't have the right brand."

"I'll buy it."

"She wouldn't have room."

"Even for you, Fannie, yes."

"And then what about my new calico cat ... ?"

And so it went until I heard the limousine shrug in against the curb below.

"So that's it, is it, Fannie?"

"I feel fine, now, now that you're here. Just tell Mrs. Gutierrez to come up and stay a while after you leave," said Fannie cheerily.

"Where does all this false optimism come from, when an hour ago you were doomed?"

"Dear boy, Fannie's fine. That dreadful beast isn't coming back, I just know, and anyway, anyway…"

With a terrible sense of timing, the entire tenement shifted in its sleep.

The door to Fannie's room whispered on its hinges.

As if shot a final time, Fannie sat up and almost gagged on her terror.

I was across the room in an instant and threw the door wide, to stare out into the long valley of the hall, a mile in this direction, a mile in that; endless dark tunnels filled with jet streams of night.

I listened and heard the plaster crack in the ceiling, the doors itch in their frames. Somewhere, a toilet muttered incessantly to itself, an old, cold, white porcelain vault in the night.

There was no one in the hall, of course.

Whoever had been there, if he ever was, had shut a door quickly, or run toward the front or out the back. Where the night came in in an invisible flood, a long winding river of wind, bringing with it memories of things eaten and things discarded, things desired, things no longer wanted.

I wanted to shriek at the empty halls, the things I had wanted to shout along the night shore outside Constance Rattigan's Arabian fort. Go. Let be. We may look as if we deserve to, but we
don't
want to die.

What I shouted to emptiness was, "All right, you kids. Get back in your rooms. Go on, now. Git! That's it. So. There."

I waited for the nonexistent kids to retreat to their nonexistent rooms and turned back in to lean against the door and shut it with a fake smile.

It worked. Or Fannie pretended it did.

"You'd make a good father." She beamed.

"No, I'd be like all fathers, out of mind and out of patience. Those kids should have been doped with beer and slugged into their cots hours ago. Feeling better, Fannie?"

"Better," she sighed, and shut her eyes.

I went and circled her with my arms, like Lindbergh going around the earth and the crowds yelling.

"It will work itself out," she said. "You go now. Everything's all right. Like you said, those kids have gone to bed."

The kids? I almost said, but stopped myself. Oh, yes, the kids.

"So Fannie's safe, and you go home. Poor baby. Tell Constance thanks but no thanks, and she can come visit, yes? Mrs. Gutierrez has promised to come up and stay tonight, on that bed I haven't used in thirty years, can you imagine? I can't sleep on my back, I can't breathe, well, Mrs. Gutierrez is coming up, and you were so kind to come visit, dear child. I see now how kind you are, you only want to save me the sadness of our friends downstairs."

"That's true, Fannie."

"There's nothing unusual about their passing on, is there?"

"No, Fannie," I lied, "only foolishness and failed beauty and sadness."

"God," she said, "you talk like Butterfly's lieutenant."

"That's why the guys at school beat me up."

I went to the door. Fannie took a deep breath and at last said, "If anything does happen to me. Not that it will. But if it does, look in the icebox."

"Look where?"

"Icebox," said Fannie, enigmatically. "Don't."

But I had jerked the icebox open already. I stared in at the light. I saw lots of jams, sauces, jellies, and mayonnaise. I shut the door after a long moment.

"You shouldn't have looked," protested Fannie.

"I don't want to wait, I've got to know."

"Now, I won't tell you," she said, indignantly. "You shouldn't have peeked. I'm just willing to admit maybe it's my fault it came into the house."

"It, Fannie? It,
it!"

"All the bad things I thought you dragged in on your shoes. But maybe Fannie was responsible. Maybe I'm guilty. Maybe I called that thing off the streets."