Death Is a Lonely Business (24 page)

It was very simple and terrible. Fannie had fallen, or been pushed, and could not get up. She had lain there in the middle of the night until her own weight crushed and smothered her. It would not have taken much to keep her in position so she could not roll over. You didn't have to use your hands on her, around her neck. Nothing had to be forced. You simply stood over her and made sure that she didn't roll to get leverage to gasp herself erect. And you watched her for a minute, two minutes, until at last the sounds stopped and the eyes turned to glass.

Oh Fannie, I groaned, oh Fannie, I mourned, what have you done to yourself?

There was the faintest whisper.

My head jerked. I stared.

Fannie's crank-up phonograph was still turning, slowly, slowly. But it was still running. Which meant that just five minutes ago, she had cranked it up, put on a record, and . . .

Answered the door on darkness.

The phonograph turntable spun. But there was no record under the needle.
Tosca
wasn't there.

I blinked, and then . . .

There was a swift knocking sound.

Constance was on her feet, choking, running. She headed for the door leading out to the balcony overlooking the trash-filled empty lot, with a view of Bunker Hill and the poolhall across the way where laughter came and went all night. Before I could stop her, she was out the screen door and to the balcony rail.

"Constance. No!" I yelled.

But she was out there only to be sick, bending over and leaning down and letting it all come out, as I much wanted to do. I could only stand and watch and look from her to the great mountain where we foothills had stood a moment before.

At last Constance stopped.

I turned, for no reason I could imagine, and went around Fannie and across the room to open a small door. A faint cold light played out over my face.

"Sweet Christ!" cried Constance, in the door behind me. "What're you doing?"

"Fannie told me," I said, my mouth numb. "Anything happened, look in the icebox."

A cold tomb wind blew out around my cheeks.

"So I'm looking."

There was nothing in the icebox, of course.

Or rather there was too much. Jellies, jams, varieties of mayonnaise, salad dressing, pickles, hot peppers, cheesecake, rolls, white bread, butter, cold cuts, an Arctic delicatessen. The panorama of Fannie's flesh was there and how it had been planned and steadily built.

I stared and stared again, trying to see what Fannie wanted me to see. Oh, Christ, I thought, what am I looking for? Is the answer one of these? I almost shoved in to hurl all the jams and jellies to the floor. I had to stop my fist, halfway in.

It's not there, or if it is, I can't see it.

I gave a terrible death groan and slammed the door.

The phonograph, with
Tosca
gone, gave up and quit.

Someone call the police, I thought. Someone?

Constance was out on the balcony again.

Me.

It was all over by three in the morning. The police had come, and everyone had been questioned and names taken and the whole tenement was awake, as if someone had started a fire in the basement, and when I came out the front of the tenement the morgue van was still parked there with the men trying to figure out how to get Fannie out and down the stairs and away. I hoped they wouldn't think of the piano box that Fannie had joked about, in the alley. They never did. But Fannie had to stay in her room until dawn, when they brought a bigger van and a larger carrier.

It was terrible, leaving her up there alone in the night. But the police wouldn't let me stay, and after all, it was a simple case of death from natural causes.

As I went down through the levels of the house, the doors were beginning to close and the lights go out, like those nights at the end of the war when the last conga line, exhausted, drained away into the rooms and down into the streets and there was the lonely walk for me up over Bunker Hill and down to the terminal where I would be taken home in thunders.

I found Constance Rattigan curled up in the back seat of her limousine, lying quietly, staring at nothing. When she heard me open the back door she said, "Get behind the wheel."

I climbed up front behind the steering wheel.

"Take me home," she said quietly.

It took me a full moment of sitting there to say finally, "I can't."

"Why not?"

"I don't know how to drive," I said.

"What?"

"I never learned. There was no reason, anyway." My tongue moved like lead between my lips. "Since when can writers afford cars?"

"Jesus." Constance managed to prop herself up and get out, like someone with a hangover. She got out and came around walking slowly and blindly and waved. "Get over."

Somehow she started the car. This time we drove at about ten miles an hour, as if there were a fog so you could only see ten feet ahead.

We made it as far as the Ambassador Hotel. She turned in there and drove up just as the last of a Saturday night party came out with balloons and funny hats. The Coconut Grove was putting out its lights above us. I saw some musicians hurrying away with their instruments.

Everyone knew Constance. We signed in and had a bungalow on the side of the hotel in a few minutes. We had no luggage but no one seemed to mind. The bellboy who took us through the garden to our place kept looking at Constance as if maybe he should carry her. When we were in the room, Constance said, "Would a fifty-dollar tip find the key and unlock the gate to let us in the swimming pool around back?"

"It would go a long way toward finding the key," the bellboy said. "But a swim, this time of night…?"

"It's my hour," said Constance.

Five minutes later the lights came on in the pool and I sat there and watched Constance dive in and swim twenty laps, on occasion swimming underwater from one end to the other without coming up for air.

When she came out, ten minutes later, she was gasping and red-faced and I cloaked her in a big towel and held her.

"When do you start crying?" I said, at last.

"Dummy," she said. "I just did. If you can't do it in the ocean, a pool's fine. If you don't have a pool, hit the shower. You can scream and yell and sob all you want, and it doesn't bother anyone, the world never hears. Ever think of that?"

"I never thought," said I, in awe.

At four o'clock in the morning, Constance found me in our bungalow bathroom, standing and staring at the shower. "Hit it," she said, gently. "Go on. Give it a try." I got in and turned the water on, hard.

At eleven in the morning, we motored through Venice and looked at the canals with a thin layer of green slime on their surface, and passed the half-torn-down pier and looked at some gulls soaring in the fog up there, and no sun yet, and the surf so quiet it was like muffled black drums.

"Screw this," said Constance. "Flip a nickel. Heads we go north to Santa Barbara. Tails, south to Tijuana."

"I don't have a nickel," I said.

"Christ." Constance grubbed in her purse and took out a quarter and tossed it in the air. "Tails!"

We were in Laguna by noon, no thanks to the highway patrol that somehow missed us.

We sat out in the open air on a cliff overlooking the beach at Victor Hugo's and had double margaritas.

"You ever see
Now, Voyager?"

"Ten times," I said.

"This is where Bette Davis and Paul Henried sat having a love lunch early in the film. This was the location, back in the early Forties. You're sitting in the very chair where Henried put his behind."

We were in San Diego by three and outside the bullring in Tijuana just at the hour of four.

"Think you can stand this?" asked Constance.

"I can only try," I said.

We made it through the third bull and came out into the late-afternoon light and had two more margaritas and a good Mexican dinner before we went north and drove out onto the island and sat in the sunset at the Hotel del Coronado. We didn't say anything, but just watched the sun go down, lighting the old Victorian towers and fresh-painted white sidings of the hotel with pink color.

Along the way home we swam in the surf at Del Mar, wordless and, from time to time, hand in hand.

At midnight we were in front of Crumley's jungle compound.

"Marry me," said Constance.

"Next time I live," I said.

"Yeah. Well, that's not bad. Tomorrow."

When she was gone I walked up the jungle path.

"Where have you been?" said Crumley, in the door.

“Uncle Wiggily says go back three hops," I said.

"The Skeezix and the Pipsisewah say come in," said Crumley.

The something cold in my hand was a beer.

"Lord," he said, "you look terrible. Come here."

He gave me a hug. I didn't think a man like Crumley ever hugged anyone, not even a woman.

"Be careful," I said, "I'm made out of glass."

"I heard this morning, friend of mind down in Central. I'm sorry, kid. I know she was a close friend. You got that list with you?"

We were out in the jungle with just the crickets sounding and Segovia, lost inside the house, playing a lament for some day a long time past when the sun stayed up for forty-eight hours in Seville.

I found my dumb list crumpled in my pocket and handed it over. "How come you want to see?"

"All of a sudden, I don't know," said Crumley. "You made me curious."

He sat down and began to read:

Old man in lion cage. Killed. Weapon unknown.

Canaries-for-sale lady. Frightened.

Pietro Massinello. In jail.

Jimmy. Drowned in bathtub.

Sam. Dead from alcohol given him by someone.

Fannie.

With an addition made in the last few hours.

Smothered.

Other new and possible victims:

Henry, the blind man.

Annie Oakley, the rifle lady.

A. L. Shrank, the fraudulent psychiatrist.

John Wilkes Hopwood.

Constance Rattigan.

Mr. Shapeshade.

With an addition. No,
cross him out.

Myself.

Crumley turned the list upside down and backward, eyeing it, rereading the names.

"That's quite a menagerie you got there, buster. How come I'm not in your sideshow?"

"There's something broken about all those people. You? You got your own self-starter."

"Just since I met you, kid." Crumley stopped and turned red. "Christ, I'm getting soft. How come you put
yourself
on the list?"

"I'm scared gutless."

"Sure, but you got a self-starter, too, and it works. According to your logic, that should protect you. As for those others? They're so busy running away fast they'll run off cliffs."

Crumley turned the list upside down again, refusing to meet my gaze, and read the names out loud.

I stopped him.

"Well?"

"Well, what?" he said.

"It's time," I said. "Hypnotize me, Crum. Elmo, in the name of the sweet Lord, put me under."

“Jesus," said Crumley.

"You've got to do it, now, tonight. You owe it to me."

"Jesus. Okay, okay. Sit down. Lie down. Do I turn out the lights? God, give me hard liquor!"

I ran to fetch chairs and put them one behind the other.

"This is the big train at night," I said. "I sit here. You sit behind."

I ran to the kitchen and brought Crumley a slug of whiskey. "You got to smell like he smelled."

"For this relief, much thanks." Crumley belted it down and shut his eyes. "This is the dumbest damn thing I have ever done, ever."

"Shut up and drink."

He finished a second one. I sat. Then I remembered and jumped to put on Crumley's African storm record. It began to rain all through the house, all around the big red train. I turned down the lights. "There. Perfect."

"Shut your yap and shut your eyes," said Crumley. "God, I don't know how to do this."

"Sh. Gently," I said.

"Sh, it is. Quiet. Okay, kid. Go to sleep."

I listened closely and carefully.

"Easy does it," drawled Crumley, behind me on the train in the night in the rain. "Serenity. Quiet. Lazy. Easy. Around the curves softly. Through the rain, quietly."

He was getting into the rhythm of it and, I could tell from his voice, beginning to enjoy.

"Easy. Slow. Quiet. Long after midnight. Rain, soft rain," whispered Crumley. "Where are you, kid?"