Death Is a Lonely Business (23 page)

He led me through the house to where coffee, a lot of it in a big pot, was cooking on the stove.

"I been working late on my masterpiece." Crumley nodded toward his bedroom typewriter. A long yellow page, like the tongue of the Muse, was hanging out of it. "I use legal paper, get more on it. I suppose I figure if I come to the end of a regular-sized page I won't go on. Jesus, you look lousy. Bad dreams?"

"The worst." I told him about the barber shop, the hundred-thousand-dollar movie sale, the monster in the night, my shouts, and the great beast moaning away gone and me alive, forever.

"Jesus." Crumley poured two big cups of something so thick it was bubbling lava. "You even
dream
better than I do!"

"What's the dream mean? We can never win, ever? If I stay poor and don't ever publish a book, I lose. But if I sell and publish and have money in the bank, do I lose, too? Do people hate you? Will friends forgive you? You're older, Crumley, tell me. Why does the beast in the dream come to kill me? Why do I have to give back the money? What's it all about?"

"Hell," snorted Crumley. "I'm no psychiatrist."

"Would A. L. Shrank know?"

"With finger-painting and stool-smearing? Naw. You going to write that dream? You always advise others...”

"When I calm down. Walking over here, a few minutes ago, I remembered my doctor once offering to tour me through the autopsy-dissection rooms. Thank God, I said no. Then I really would have been dreadfully attended. I'm overworked now. How do I clean out the lion cage in my head? How do I smooth the old canary lady's bedsheets? How do I coax Cal the barber back from Joplin? How do I protect Fannie, across town tonight and no weapons?"

"Drink your coffee," advised Crumley.

I grubbed in my pocket and took out the picture of Cal with Scott Joplin except Joplin's head was still missing. I told Crumley where I had found it.

"Someone stole the head off this picture. When Cal saw that, he knew someone was on to him, the jig was up, and got out of town."

"That's not murder," said Crumley.

"Same as," I said.

"Same as pigs flying and turkeys getting carbuncles tap-dancing. Next case, as they say in court."

"Someone gave Sam too much booze and killed him. Someone turned Jimmy over in the bathtub to drown. Someone called the police on Pietro and he was hauled away and that will finish him. Someone stood over the canary lady and very simply scared her to death. Someone shoved that old man into the lion cage."

"Got some further coroner's reports on him," said Crumley. "Blood was full of gin."

"Right. Someone soused him, knocked him on the head, pulled him into the canal, already dead, shoved him behind bars, came out, and walked to his car or his apartment somewhere in Venice, all wet, but who would notice a wet man, no umbrella, in a storm?"

"Shoat. No, let me use a dirtier word, shirt. You couldn't buy a judge doughnuts and Java with this garage sale of yours, buster. People die. Accidents happen. Motive, damn it, motive. All you got is that rummy song, last night I saw upon the stair, a little man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. My God, I wish he'd go away! Think. If this so-called killer exists, there's only one person we know who's been around it all. You."

"Me? You don't think...”

"No, and calm down. Avert those big pink rabbity eyes. Jesus, let me go find something."

Crumley walked over to a bookshelf on one side of his kitchen (there were books in every room of his house) and grabbed down a thick volume.

He tossed
Shakespeare's Collected Plays
on the kitchen table.

"Meaningless malignity," he said.

"What?"

"Shakespeare's full of it, you're full of it, me, everyone. Meaningless malignity. Don't that have a ring? It means someone running around doing lousy things, a bastard, for no reason. Or none we can figure."

"People don't run around being sons-of-bitches for no reason."

"God." Crumley snorted gently. "You're naive. Half the cases we handle over at the station are guys gunning red lights to kill pedestrians, or beating up their wives, or shooting friends, for reasons they can't recall. The motives are there, sure, but buried so deep it would take nitro to blast them out. And if there is a guy like the one you're trying to find with your beer reason and whiskey logic, there's no way to find him. No motives, no root systems, no clues. He's walking about scot-free and unencumbered unless you can connect the ankle-bone to the legbone to the kneebone to the thighbone."

Crumley, looking happy, sat down, poured more coffee.

"Ever stop to think," he said, "there are no toilets in graveyards?"

My jaw dropped. "Boy! I never thought of that! No need for restrooms out among the tombstones. Unless! Unless you're writing an Edgar Allan Poe tale and a corpse gets up at midnight and has to go."

"You going to write that? Jesus, here I am, giving away ideas."

"Crumley."

"Here it comes," he sighed, pushing his chair back.

"You believe in hypnotism? Mind regression?"

"You're already regressed...”

"Please." I gathered my spit. "I'm going nuts. Regress me. Shove me back!"

"Holy Moses." Crumley was on his feet, emptying the coffee and grabbing beer out of the icebox. "Outside the nut farm, where do you want to be sent?"

"I've met the murderer, Crumley. Now I want to meet him again. I tried to ignore him because he was drunk. He was behind me on that last big red train to the sea that night I found the old man dead in the lion cage."

"No proof."

"Something he said was proof, but I've forgotten. If you could ticket me back, let me ride that train again in the storm, and listen for his voice, then I'd know who it is and the killings would stop. Don't you want them to?"

"Sure, and after I talk you back with a hypnotic dog act and you bark the results, I go arrest the killer, hmm? Come along now, bad man, my friend the writer heard your voice in a hypnotic seance and that's more than proof. Here are the handcuffs. Snap 'em on!"

"The hell with you." I stood up and jarred my coffee cup down. "I'll hypnotize myself. That's what it's all about, anyway, isn't it? Autosuggestion? It's always me that puts me under?"

"You're not trained, you don't know how. Sit down, for Christ's sake. I'll help you find a good hypnotist. Hey!" Crumley laughed somewhat crazily. "What about A. L. Shrank, hypnotist?"

"God." I shuddered. "Don't even joke. He'd sink me down with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy
and I'd never surface again. You got to do it, Elmo."

"I got to get you out and me to bed."

He led me gently to the door.

He insisted on driving me home. On the way, looking straight ahead at the dark future, he said, "Don't worry, kid. Nothing more is going to happen."

Crumley was wrong.

But not immediately, of course. I awoke at six in the morning because I thought I heard three dozen rifle shots again.

But it was only the annihilators at the pier, the workmen dentists, yanking the big teeth. Why, I thought, do destroyers start so early to destroy. And those rifle shots? Probably just their laughter.

I showered and ran out just in time to meet a fogbank rolling in from Japan.

The old men from the trolley station were on the beach ahead of me. It was the first time I had seen them since the day their friend Mr. Smith who wrote his name on his bedroom wall had vanished.

I watched them watching the pier die, and I could feel the timbers fall inside their bodies. The only motion they made was a kind of chewing of their gums, as if they might spit tobacco. Their hands hung down at their sides, twitching. With the pier gone, I knew, they knew, it was only a matter of time before the asphalt machines droned along and tarred over the railroad tracks and someone nailed shut the ticket office and broomed away the last of the confetti. If I had been them, I would have headed for Arizona or some bright place that afternoon. But I wasn't them. I was just me, half a century younger and with no rust on my knuckles and no bones cracking every time the big pliers out there gave a yank and made an emptiness.

I went and stood between two of the old men, wanting to say something that counted.

But all I did was let out a big sigh.

It was a language they understood.

Hearing it, they waited a long while.

And then, they nodded.

“Well, here's another fine mess you got me in!"

My voice, on its way to Mexico City, was Oliver Hardy's voice.

"Ollie," cried Peg, using Stan Laurel's voice. "Fly down here. Save me from the mummies of Guanajuato!"

Stan and Ollie. Ollie and Stan. From the start we had called ours the Laurel and Hardy Romance, because we had grown up madly in love with the team, and did a fair job of imitating their voices.

"Why don't you do something to
help
me?" I cried, like Mr. Hardy.

And Peg as Laurel spluttered back, "Oh, Ollie, I… I mean, it seems, I…"

And there was silence as we breathed our despair, need, and loving grief back and forth, mile on mile and dollar on Peg's dear dollar.

"You can't afford this, Stan," I sighed, at last. "And it's beginning to hurt where aspirins can't reach. Stan, dear Stanley, so long."

"Oll," she wept. "Dear Ollie, goodbye."

As I said . . . Crumley was wrong.

At exactly one minute after eleven that night, I heard the funeral car pull up in front of my apartment.

I hadn't been asleep and I knew the sound of Constance Rattigan's limousine by the gentle hiss of its arrival and then the bumbling under its breath, waiting for me to stir.

I got up, asked no questions of God or anyone, and dressed automatically without seeing what I put on. Something had made me reach for my dark pants, a black shirt, and an old blue blazer. Only the Chinese wear white for the dead.

I held on to the front doorknob for a full minute before I had strength enough to pull the door open and go out. I didn't climb in the back seat, I climbed up front where Constance was staring straight ahead at the surf rolling white and cold on the shore.

Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She didn't say anything, but moved the limousine quietly. Soon we were flying steadily down the middle of Venice Boulevard.

I was afraid to ask questions because I feared answers.

About halfway there, Constance said:

"I had this premonition."

That's all she said. I knew she hadn't called anyone. She simply had to go see for herself.

As it turned out, even if she had called someone, it would have been too late.

We rolled up in front of the tenement at eleven-thirty p.m.

We sat there and Constance, still staring ahead, the tears streaking down her cheeks, said:

"God, I feel as though I weigh three-eighty. I can't move."

But we had to, at last.

Inside the tenement, halfway up the steps, Constance suddenly fell to her knees, shut her eyes, crossed herself, and gasped, "Oh, please, God, please,
please
let Fannie be alive."

I helped her the rest of the way up the stairs, drunk on sadness.

At the top of the stairs in the dark there was a vast in-sucked draft that pulled at us as we arrived. A thousand miles off, at the far end of night, someone had opened and shut the door on the north side of the tenement. Going out for air? Going out to escape? A shadow moved in a shadow. The cannon bang of the door reached us an instant later. Constance rocked on her heels. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along.

We moved through weather that got older and colder and darker as we went. I began to run, making strange noises, incantations, with my mouth, to protect Fannie.

It's all right, she'll be there, I thought, making magic prayers, with her phonograph records and Caruso photos and astrology charts and mayonnaise jars and her singing and . . .

She was there all right.

The door hung open on its hinges.

She was there in the middle of the linoleum in the middle of the room, lying on her back.

"Fannie!" we both shouted at once.

Get up! we wanted to say. You can't breathe lying on your back! You haven't been to bed in thirty years. You must always sit up, Fannie, always.

She did not get up. She did not speak. She did not sing.

She did not even breathe.

We sank to our knees by her, pleading in whispers, or praying inside. We kneeled there like two worshippers, two penitents, two healers, and put out our hands, as if that would do it. Just by touching we would bring her back to life.

But Fannie lay there staring at the ceiling as if to say: how curious, what is the ceiling doing there? and why don't I speak?