Death Is a Lonely Business (34 page)

"But you helped, too," he said, reasonably. "You're a writer. Curious. All I had to do was follow, collecting your candy wrappers as you went. Do you know how easy it is to follow people? They never look back. Never. You never did. Oh dear, you never knew. You were my good dog of death, for more times than you guess. Over a year. You showed me the people you were collecting for your books. All the gravel on the path, chaff in the wind, empty shells on the shore, dice with no spots, cards with no pips. No past, no present. So I gave them no future."

I looked up at him. My strength was coming back. The sadness was just about over for now. My anger built a slew pressure.

"You admit it all, do you?"

"Why not? It's all sour breath on the wind. If when we finish here and I actually walk you to the police station, which I will, you have no proof of what I've said. It's all lost hot air."

"Not quite," I said. "You couldn't resist taking one thing from each victim. Your godawful place is full of phonograph records, champagne, and old newspapers."

"Son-of-a-bitch!" said Shrank, and stopped. He barked a laugh and then made a grin. "Pretty smart. Got it out of me, eh?"

He rocked on his heels, thinking about it.

"Now," he said, "I'll just have to kill
you.
"

I jumped up. I was a foot taller and not brave, but he jumped back.

"No," I said. "You can't do that."

"Why not!"

"Because," I said, "you can't lay hands on me. You didn't lay hands on them. It was all hands off. I see it now. Your logic was to get people to do things to themselves, or destroy them indirectly. Right?"

"Right!" His pride was involved again. He forgot me standing there and looked off at his bright and glorious past.

"Train ticket office old man. All you did was get him drunk? Knock his head on the edge of the canal, maybe, then jump in and make sure he got in the lion cage."

"Right!"

"Canaries-for-sale old lady. All you did was stand over her bed and make faces?"

"Right!"

"Sam. Gave him enough hard liquor to put him in the hospital."

"Right!"

"Jimmy. Made sure he had three times too much booze.

You didn't even have to turn him over in the bathtub. Rolled over himself, gone."

"Right!"

"Pietro Massinello. You wrote the city government to come get him and his ten dozen dogs, cats, and birds. If he isn't dead now, soon will be?"

"Right!"

"Gal the barber, of course."

"I stole Scott Joplin's head," said Shrank.

"So Cal, scared, left town. John Wilkes Hopwood. Him and his immense ego. Wrote him using Constance Rattigan's stationery, got him to come naked on the beach every night. Scaring Constance out to drown herself?"

"Indeed!"

"Then got rid of Hopwood by letting him know you had seen him on the beach the night Constance vanished. You added a really terrible dirty letter, calling him everything vile."

"Everything he was."

"And Fannie Florianna. Left your ad by her door. And when she called and you made an appointment, all you did was come over, burst in, same as with the old canary lady, frighten Fannie so she ran backward, yes, fell and couldn't get up, and all you had to do was stand over her to make sure she didn't, yes?"

He knew better than to say yes to this, to say anything, for I was furious now, still shaky but getting strength from my own madness.

"You made only one mistake all along the way over the weeks. Sending the papers to Fannie, leaving them, marked. When you remembered this and went back and broke in, you couldn't find them. The one place you didn't think to look was the icebox. Your newspaper notice put under the jars to catch drips. I found it there. That's why I'm here. And not about to be the next on your list. Or do you have other plans?"

"Yes."

"No, and do you know why not? For two reasons. One, I'm not a Lonely. I'm not a failure. I'm not lost. I'm going to make it. I'm going to be happy. I'm going to marry and have a good wife and children. I'm going to write damned fine books and be loved. That doesn't fit your pattern. You can't kill me, you damn stupid jerk, because I'm okay. You see? I'm going to live forever. Secondly, you can't lay a finger on me. No one else has been touched by you. If you touch me, it spoils your record. You got all your other deaths by fear or intimidation. But now if you try to prevent my going to the police, you'll have to commit
real
murder, you sick bastard.

I plowed off with him running after in utter confusion, almost tugging at my elbows for attention. "Right, right. I almost killed you a year ago. But then you made those sales to magazines and then you met that woman and I decided to just follow you and collect people, yes, that was it. And it really began that night on the Venice train, in the storm, and me drunk. You were so close to me that night on the train, I could have reached out and touched. And the rain came down and if you had just turned, but you didn't, you would have seen me and known me, but you didn't and…"

We were off the pier and in the dark street by the canal now and moving swiftly over the bridge. The boulevard was empty. I saw no cars, no lights. I rushed.

In the middle of the bridge over the canal, by the lion cages, Shrank stopped and caught hold of the railing.

"Why don't you understand me, help me!" he wailed. "I wanted to kill you, I
did!
But it would have been like killing Hope, and there has to be some of that in the world, doesn't there, even for people like me?"

I stared at him. "Not after tonight."

"Why?" he gasped, "why?" looking at the cold oily water.

"Because you're utterly and completely insane," I said.

"I'll kill you now."

"No," I said, with immense sadness. "There's only one person left to kill. One last Lonely. The empty one. You."

"Me?" shrieked the little man.

"You."

"Me?" he screamed. "Damn, damn, damn you!"

He spun. He grabbed the rails. He leaped.

His body went down in darkness.

He sank in waters as oiled and scummy as his coat, as terrible and dark as his soul, to be covered and lost.

"Shrank!" I yelled.

He did not rise.

Come back, I wanted to yell.

But then, suddenly, I was afraid he would.

“Shrank," I whispered. "Shrank." I bent over the bridge, staring at the green scum and the gaseous tide. "I know you're there."

It just couldn't be over. It was too simple. He was somewhere out of the light, brooding like a dark toad, under the bridge, maybe, eyes up, waiting, face green, sucking air, very quietly. I listened. Not a drip. Not a ripple. Not a sigh.

"Shrank," I whispered.

Shrank, echoed the timbers under the bridge.

Off along the shore, the great oil beasts lifted their heads up at my summons, sank them down again, in time to a long sighing roll of water on the coast.

Don't wait, I thought I heard Shrank murmuring. It's nice down here. Quiet at last. I think I'll stay.

Liar, I thought. You'll come up when I least expect it.

The bridge creaked. I whirled.

Nothing. Nothing but fog sifting across the empty boulevard.

Run, I thought. Run telephone. Call Crumley. Why isn't he here? Run. But no. If I did, Shrank might go free.

Far away, two miles off, the big red trolley bucketed along, whistling, wailing, sounding like the terrible beast in my dream, come to take my time, my life, my future away, heading for a tar pit at the end of the line.

I found a small pebble and dropped it in.

Shrank.

It hit and sank. Silence.

He's escaped me. I wanted to pay him back for Fannie.

Then, Peg, I thought. Call her.

But no, she would have to wait, too.

My heart pounded so loudly that I feared the waters would stir below and the dead rise. I feared that my very breathing would knock down the oil derricks. I held onto my heart and breath and made them slow, eyes shut.

Shrank, I thought, come out. Fannie's here, waiting. The canary lady's here, waiting. The old man from the ticket office is beside me. Pietro's here and wants his pets. Come out. I'm here, along with the rest, waiting.

Shrank!

This time he must have heard.

He came to get me.

He shot out of the black water like a cannonball off a springboard.

Christ, I thought,
fool!
Why did you call to him?

He was ten feet tall, a dragon yeasted up from a dwarf. Grendel, who was once a jockey.

He snatched up like a Fury, talons out. He hit me like a balloon full of scalding water, with thrash and yell and shriek. He had long since forgotten his good intentions, his plans, his myth, his murderous integrity.

"Shrank!" I yelled.

There was something slow-motion and terrible about it, as if, frame by frame, I might stop him along the way and examine his astonishing arc and growth, and how his eyes blazed and his mouth ached with hate and hands gripped with rage as he seized my coat, my shirt, my neck in iron grapples. His mouth was blooded with my name as he heaved back. The tar waters waited. Christ, not there, I thought. The lion cages waited with doors flung wide.

"No!"

The slow motion stopped. The swift fall followed.

Fused by his rage, we fell down, sucking air in flight.

We struck like two concrete statues and sank, loving each other with a mindless frenzy of passion, climbing each other to keep each other down, making ladders to air and light.

On the way down I thought I heard him whining, wailing, "Get in there, get in there, get in," like a boy at some rude game without rules, and I was playing wrong. "Get in!"

But now, under, we went from sight. We whirled around like two crocodiles at each other's necks. From up top we must have seemed like a moil and welter of piranhas self-feasting, or a great propeller off center and amok in rainbow oils and tars.

And at center of the drowning there was a small pinpoint flash of hope which burst but to fire again behind my eyes.

This is his first real murder, I must have thought, or was there time? But I am flesh and will not behave. I fear dark more than he fears life. He must know that. I must win!

Not proven.

We rolled and struck something that knocked most of the air from my lungs. The lion cage. He was shoving and kicking me through the open door. I thrashed. We whirled and in the surge and white water I suddenly thought:

God. I'm inside. The cage. The whole thing ends as it began! Crumley comes to find me! beckoning behind the bars at dawn. Christ. My lungs ballooned with fire. I tried to whirl and knock free. I wanted to shout him off with my last breath. I wanted to ...

It was over.

Shrank relaxed his grip.

What? I thought. What? What!

He almost let go.

I seized him to push but it was like grabbing a dummy that had suddenly lost its ability to gesticulate. It was like handling a corpse that had leaped out of the grave and now wanted back.

He's quit, I thought. He knows he must be the last one. He knows he can't kill me, it doesn't fit.

He had indeed made up his mind and as I held him I could see his face, the merest pale ghost, and the shrug that said I was to at last go free and move up toward night and air and life. In the dark water, I saw his eyes accept his own dread as he opened his mouth, flexed his nostrils, and let out a terrible gaseous illumination. Whereupon he took a deep breath of black water and sank away, a lost man seeking his final loss.

He was a cold marionette I left behind in the cage as blindly I thrashed for the door, pushed out, and pushed up, wildly praying to live forever, to seek the fog, to find Peg, wherever she was in all the dread damned world.

I broke up and out into a mist that had begun to rain. As my head burst out, I gave a great cry of relief and sorrow. All the souls of all the people lost and not wanting to be lost in the last month wailed out of me. I gagged, threw up, almost sank again, but made it to the bank and dragged myself out to sit and wait on the rim of the canal.

Somewhere in the world I heard a car pull up, a door slam, running feet. Out of the rain, one long arm reached and a big hand clutched to shake my shoulder. Crumley's face, like a frog's under glass, came to view in a movie closeup. He looked like a father in shock, bending to his drowned son.

"You okay, you all right, you okay?"

I nodded, gasping.

Henry came up behind, sniffing the rain, alert for dread smells and finding none.

"He okay?" said Henry.

"Alive," I said, and truly meant it. "Oh, God, alive."

"Where's Armpits? I got to give him one for Fannie."