Death Is a Lonely Business (27 page)

From under the towel his voice said quietly:

"The interview is over."

"Did it ever really begin?" I said.

I went downstairs as the dragon's sick calliope music was coming up.

There were no words at all on the Venice Cinema marquee. All the letters were gone.

I read the emptiness half a dozen times, feeling something roll over and die in my chest.

I went around trying all the doors, which were locked, and looked into the box office, which was deserted, and glanced at the big poster frames where Barrymore and Chancy and Norma Shearer had smiled just a few nights ago. Now, nothing.

I backed off and read the emptiness a last time to myself, quietly.

"How do you like the double bill?" asked a voice from behind me.

I turned. Mr. Shapeshade was there, beaming. He handed over a big roll of theater posters. I knew what it was. My diplomas from Nosferatu Institute, Graduate School of Quasimodo, Postgraduate in d'Artagnan and Robin Hood.

"Mr. Shapeshade, you can't give these to me."

"You're a romantic sap, aren't you?"

"Sure, but...”

"Take, take. Farewell, goodbye. But another farewell, goodbye, out beyond. Kummensei pier oudt!"

He left the diplomas in my hands and trotted off.

I found him at the end of the pier, pointing down and watching my face to see me crumple and seize the pier rail, staring over.

The rifles were down there, silent for the first time in years. They lay on the sea bottom about fifteen feet under, but the water was clear because the sun was coming out.

I counted maybe a dozen long, cold, blue metal weapons down there where the fish swam by.

"Some farewell, huh?" Shapeshade glanced where I was looking. "One by one. One by one. Early this morning. I came running up, yelled, what're you doing!? What does it look like? she said. And one by one, over and down. They're closing your place, they're closing mine this afternoon, so what the hell, she said. And one by one."

"She didn't," I said, and stopped. I searched the waters under the pier and far out. "She didn't?"

"Was she the last one in? No, no. Just stood here a long time, with me, watching the ocean. They won't be here long, she said. Week from now, gone. A bunch of stupid guys will dive and bring them up, yes? What could I say. Yes."

"She leave any word when she went?"

I could not take my eyes off the long rifles that shone in the flowing tide.

"Said she was going somewhere to milk cows. But no bulls, she said, no bulls. Milk cows and churn butter, was the last thing I heard."

"I hope she will," I said.

The rifles suddenly swarmed with fish who seemed to have come to see. But there were no sounds of firing.

"Their silence," said Shapeshade, "is nice, eh?"

I nodded.

"Don't forget these," said Shapeshade.

They had fallen out of my hands. He picked up and handed me my diplomas for all the years of my young life running up and down popcorn aisles in the dark with the Phantom and the Hunchback.

On the way back, I passed a little boy who stood staring down at the remains of the rollercoaster lying like strewn bones on the shore.

"What's that dinosaur doing lying there dead on the beach?" he said.

I had thought of it first. I resented this boy who saw the collapsed rollercoaster as I saw it: a beast dead in the tides.

No! I wanted to yell at him.

But aloud I said, gently, "Oh, Lord, son, I wish I knew."

I turned and staggered away, carrying an armload of invisible rifles down the pier.

I had two dreams that night. In the first, A. L. Shrank's Sigmund Freud Schopenhauer tarot card shop was knocked to flinders by the great hungry steamshovel, so off in the tide floated the Marquis de Sade and Thomas De Quincey, and Mark Twain's sick daughters and Sartre on a truly bad day, drowning in the dark waters over the shine of the shooting gallery rifles.

The second dream was a newsreel I had seen of the Russian royal family, lined up by their graves, and shot so that they jerked and jumped like a silent film projection, knocked, blown away, end over end, like popped corks, into the pit. It made you gasp with horrid laughter. Inhuman. Hilarious. Bam!

There went Sam, Jimmy, Pietro, canary lady, Fannie, Cal, old lion-cage man, Constance, Shrank, Crumley, Peg, and
me!

Bam!

I slammed awake, sweating ice.

The telephone, across the street in the gas station, was ringing.

It stopped.

I held my breath.

It rang again once, and stopped.

I waited.

It rang again, once, and stopped.

Oh, God, I thought, Peg wouldn't do that. Crumley wouldn't do that. Ring once and stop?

The phone rang again, once. Then, silence.

It's him. Mr. Lonely Death. Calling to tell me things I don't want to know.

I sat up, the hairs on my body fuzzed as if Cal had run his Bumblebee Electric barber shears down my neck to strike a nerve.

I dressed and ran out to the shoreline. I took a deep breath, then stared south.

Far away down the coast, all of the windows in Constance Rattigan's Moorish fort were brightly lit.

Constance, I thought. Fannie won't like this.

Fannie?

And then I
really
ran.

I came in from the surf, like Death himself. Every light in Constance's place was burning, and every door stood wide open, as if she had opened them all to let nature and the world and night and the wind in to clean her place while she was gone.

And she was gone.

I knew without even going in her place, because there was a long line of her footprints coming down to the tideline where I stopped and looked to see where they went in the water, but never came out.

I wasn't surprised. I was surprised that I wasn't surprised. I walked up to her wide-open front door and didn't call, or almost called for her chauffeur and laughed to think I might have been so foolish, and went in without touching anything. The phonograph was playing in the Arabian parlor. Dance music by Ray Noble, from London, in 1934, some Noel Coward tunes. I let the music play. The projector was on, mindlessly whirling its reel, the film done, the white light of the bulb staring at the blank front wall. I didn't think to turn it off. A bottle of Moe't et Chandon stood iced and waiting, as if she had gone down to the sea expecting to bring some golden god of the deep back with her.

Cheeses were laid out on a plate on a pillow, along with a shaker of martinis, getting watery. The Duesenberg was in the garage and the footprints still lay in the sand, going only one way. I telephoned Crumley, and congratulated myself on not crying just yet, feeling numb.

"Crumley?" I said into the telephone.

"Crumley. Crum," I said.

"Child of the night," he said. "You bet on another wrong horse again?"

I told him where I was.

"I can't walk very well." I sat down suddenly, clenching the phone. "Come get me."

Crumley met me on the shore.

We stood looking up at that Arabian fort all brightly lit like a festive tent in the middle of a desert of sand. The door opening out on the shore was still wide and the music was playing inside, a stack of records that seemed never to want to stop dropping. It was "Lilac Time," then it was "Diane," then it was "Ain't She Sweet?" followed by "Hear My Song of the Nile" and then "Pagan Love Song." I expected Ramon Novarro to show up at any moment, run in, and come out wild haired and mad of eye, rushing down to the shore.

"But there's just me and Crumley."

"Unh?"

"I didn't know I was thinking out loud," I apologized.

We trudged up the shore.

"You touch anything?"

"Only the phone."

When we reached the door I let him go in and prowl through the house and come out.

"Where's the chauffeur?"

"That's something else I never told you. There never was one."

"What?"

I told him about Constance Rattigan and her role playing.

"She was her own all-star cast, huh? Jesus. Louder and funnier, as they say."

We went back out to stand on the wind-blown porch to look at the footprints that were beginning to blow away.

"Could be suicide," said Crumley.

"Constance wouldn't do that."

"Christ, you're so godawful sure about people. Why don't you grow up? Just because you like someone doesn't mean they can't take the big jump without you."

"There was someone on the shore, waiting for her."

"Proof."

We followed Constance's single line of prints down to the surf.

"He was standing over there." I pointed. "Two nights. I saw him."

"Swell. Ankle deep in water. So no prints for the killer. What else you want to show me, son?"

"Someone called me an hour ago, woke me up, told me to come along the beach. That someone knew her house was empty or soon going to be."

"Phone call, huh? Swell again. Now you’re
ankle deep in water and no prints. That the whole story?"

My cheeks must have reddened. He saw that I had been telling a half-truth. I didn't want to admit I hadn't answered the phone the last time, but ran down the beach on a terrible hunch.

"At least you got integrity, scribe." Crumley looked at the white waves combing in, then at the footprints, then at the house, white, cold, and empty in the middle of the night. "You know what integrity means? Based on the word integers. Numbers. Integrity means to add up. Has nothing to do with virtue. Hitler had integrity. Zero plus zero plus zero makes zero, no score. Phone calls and footprints underwater and blind hunches and dopey faith. These late-night shootings are beginning to tell on me. That about
do
it?"

"No, damn it. I've got a real, live suspect. Constance recognized him. I did, too, went to see him. Find out where he was tonight, you got the killer! You…"

I lost control of my voice. I had to take my glasses off and wipe the tiny wet salt-marks off so I could see.

Crumley patted my cheek and said, "Hey, don't. How do you know this guy, whoever he is, didn't take her in the water and…"

"Drown her!"

"Swim with her, talk nice, and they swam north one hundred yards and walked back to his place. For all you know, she'll be dragging home at dawn with a funny smile on her face."

"No," I said.

"What, am I spoiling the mysterious romance of all this for you?"

"No."

But he could tell I was uncertain.

He touched my elbow. "What else haven't you said?"

"Constance mentioned she had some real estate not far from here, down the coast."

"You sure she didn't just go there tonight? If what you say's true, what if she got spooked, pulled up stakes?"

"Her limousine's still here."

"People walk, you know.
You
do it all the time. Lady could walk a mile south, spooked, in an inch of water, and us no wiser."

I looked south to see if I could see a beautiful lady, escaped along the strand.

"Thing is," said Crumley, "we got nothing to go on. Empty house. Old records playing. No suicide note. No sign of violence. We got to wait for her to come back. And if she doesn't, there's
still
no case, no corpus delicti. I bet you a bucket of beer she'll…"

"Let me take you to the upstairs apartment at the carousel tomorrow. When you see that strange man's face…"

"God. Do you mean who I think you mean?"

I nodded.

"The airy-fairy?" said Crumley. "The fag?"

There was a tremendous flop in the water just then.

We both jumped.

"Jesus, what was that?" cried Crumley, peering out over the midnight waters.

Constance, I thought, coming back.

I stared and at last said, "Seals. They do come and play out there."

There was a series of small flops and splashes which faded as some sea creature departed in darkness.

"Hell," said Crumley.

"The projector's still running there in the parlor," I said. "Phonograph's still playing. Oven's on in the kitchen, something baking. And all the lights in all the rooms."

"Let's shut some off before the damn place burns down."

We followed Constance Rattigan's footprints back up to her fortress of white light.

"Hey," whispered Crumley. He stared at the eastern horizon. "What's that?"

There was a faint band of cold light there.

"Dawn," I said. "I thought it would never come."