Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  I opened my eyes. I looked at the hall which led to my two-by-four kitchen and my two-by-two Singer’s Midgets bathroom.

  I had hung an old torn white bathrobe there last night.

  But now the robe wasn’t a robe. With my glasses off and lying on the floor by my cot—my vision being what it was, almost legally blind—the robe had … changed.

  It was the Beast.

  When I was five years old, living east in Illinois, and had to go up some dark stairs in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, the Beast was always at the top of the stairs, unless the small stairwell light was lit. Sometimes my mother would forget to turn it on. I would try terribly hard to make it to the top without looking up. But always I was afraid, and I had to look up. And the Beast was always there, with the sound of the dark locomotives rushing by far out in night country, funeral trains taking dear cousins or uncles away. And stood at the bottom of the stairs and …

  Screamed.

  Now the Beast was hanging here on the edge of my door leading into darkness, the hall, the kitchen, the bathroom.

  Beast, I thought, go away.

  Beast, I said to the shape. I know you’re not there. You’re nothing. You’re my old bathrobe.

  The trouble was, I couldn’t see it clearly.

  If I could just reach my glasses, I thought, get them on, jump up.

  Lying there, I was eight and then seven and then five and then four years old, getting smaller, smaller, and smaller as the Beast on the door got bigger and darker and longer.

  I was afraid to so much as blink. Afraid that that motion would make the Beast float softly down to …

  “Ah!” someone yelled.

  Because the phone, across the street, rang.

  Shut up! I thought. You’ll make the Beast move.

  The phone rang. Four in the morning. Four! Christ. Who—?

  Peg? Trapped in a Mexican catacomb? Lost?

  The phone rang.

  Crumley? With an autopsy report I would hate to hear?

  The phone rang.

  Or a voice of cold rain and running night and raw alcohol raving in the storm and mourning terrible events, as the great train shrieked on a curve?

  The phone stopped.

  With my eyes clenched, my teeth gritted, the covers over my head, turned away against the sweaty pillow. I thought I heard a drifting whisper. I froze.

  I kept my breath, I stopped my heart.

  For, just now, at that very instant …

  Hadn’t I felt something touch and—weigh itself …

  On the end of my bed?

  A.L. Shrank was not the next victim.

  Nor did the canary lady suddenly fly around her room once and expire.

  Someone else vanished.

  And, not long after dawn, the bright glass eyes across the street from my tired apartment saw the arrival of the evidence.

  A truck pulled up outside.

  Sleepless and exhausted, I heard it, stirred.

  Someone knocked on my coffin door.

  I managed to levitate and balloon-drift over to crack the door and peer gum-eyed into the face of a great beefy ox. The face named me, I assented to the name, the ox told me to sign here, I signed something that looked like a D.O.A. slip and watched the delivery man hoof back to his half-truck and wrestle a familiar, bundled object off the back and wheel it along the walk.

  “My God,” I said. ‘‘What is it? Who—?”

  But the big rolling bundle struck the doorjamb and gave off a musical chord. I slumped, knowing the answer.

  “Where do you want it?” said the ox, glancing around Groucho Marx’s overcrowded stateroom. “This as good as any?”

  He heaved the wrapped object to one side against the wall, looked around with contempt at my Goodwill sofa, my rugless floor, and my typewriter, and cattle-trotted back out to his truck, leaving the door wide.

  Over the way, I saw the ten dozen bright blue, brown, hazel glass eyes watching, even as I ripped away the covering to stare at …

  The Smile.

  “My God!” I cried. “That’s the piano that I heard playing—”

  The “Maple Leaf Rag.”

  Wham. The truck door slammed. The truck roared away.

  I collapsed on my already collapsed sofa, totally disbelieving that big, vacant, ivory smile.

  Crumley, I said in my mind. I felt the lousy haircut too high in back, too short on the sides. My fingers were numb.

  Yeah, kid? said Crumley.

  I changed my mind. I thought, Crumley, it’s not going to be Shrank or the old bird lady who vanishes.

  Gosh, said Crumley, who?

  Cal, the barber.

  Silence. A sigh. Then …

  Click. Buzz.

  Which is why, gazing at this relic from Scott Joplin years, I did not race forth to telephone my police detective friend.

  All the glass eyes across the street examined my haircut and watched me shut my door.

  God, I thought, I can’t even play “Chopsticks.”

  The barber shop was open and empty. The ants, the bees, the termites, and the relatives had been there before noon.

  I stood in the front door looking at the total evisceration. It was as if someone had shoved a gigantic vacuum cleaner through the front door and sucked everything out.

  The piano, of course, had come to me. I wondered who had gotten, or would want, the barber chair, the liniments, the ointments, the lotions that used to color the mirrored wall with their tints and tinctures. I wondered who got all the hair.

  There was a man in the middle of the barber shop, the landlord, I seemed to recall, a man in his fifties moving a pushbroom over no hair, just gliding over the empty tiles for no obvious reason. He looked up and saw me.

  “Cal’s gone,” he said.

  “So I see,” I said.

  “Bastard ran off owing me four months’ rent.”

  “Business was that bad, was it?”

  “It wasn’t the business so much as the haircuts. Even for two bucks they were the lousiest, won awards, in the whole state.”

  I felt the top of my head and the nape of my neck and nodded.

  “Bastard ran off owing me five months’ rent. I heard from the groceryman next door Cal was here at seven this morning. Goodwill came at eight for the barber chair. Salvation Army got all the rest. Who knows who got the piano. I’d like to find and sell that, get some of my money.” The landlord looked at me.

  I said nothing. The piano was the piano. For whatever reasons, Cal had sent it to me.

  “Where you think he’s gone?” I said.

  “Got relatives in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, I hear. Someone was just in said he heard Cal say two days ago he was going to drive until the land gave out and then pitch right into the Atlantic.”

  “Cal wouldn’t do that.”

  “No, he more likely will sink somewhere in the Cherokee Strip country and good riddance. Jesus, that was bad haircutting.”

  I wandered in over the clean white tiles through no-hair territory, not knowing what I was looking for.

  “Who are you?” said the landlord, half-raising his broom into artillery position.

  “The writer,” I said. “You know me. The Crazy.”

  “Hell, I didn’t recognize you. Did Cal do that to you?”

  He stared at my hairline. I felt blood rush along my scalp. “Only yesterday,” I said.

  “He could be shot for that.”

  I wandered across and around behind a thin wooden partition that hid the backside of the barber shop, the trash barrels, and the restroom.

  I stared down into the trash barrel and saw what I was looking for there.

  The photograph of Cal and Scott Joplin, covered with a month’s supply of hair, which was not much.

  I reached down and picked up the photo.

  In the next five or six seconds my whole body turned to ice.

  Because Scott Joplin was gone.

  Cal was still there, forever young,
smiling, his thin fingers spidering the piano keys.

  But the man who stood over him, grinning.

  It wasn’t Joplin.

  It was another man, black, younger, more sinful looking.

  I peered very close.

  There were marks of old dry glue where Scott’s head had once been.

  Jesus God have mercy on Cal, I thought. None of us ever thought to look close. And, of course, the picture was always under glass and hung rather high on the wall, not easy to reach or take down.

  Sometime, a long while ago, Cal had found a picture of Scott Joplin, razor cut around it, and pasted it over this other guy’s face, head on head. He must have forged the signature as well. And all these years we had looked at it and sighed and clucked and said, “Hey, Cal, great! Aren’t you special? Looky there!”

  And all those years Cal had looked at it and known what a fraud it was and he was and cut hair so you looked as if you’d been blown dry by a Kansas twister and combed by a maniac wheat harvester run amok.

  I turned the photograph over and reached down into the barrel, trying to find Scott Joplin’s decapitated and missing part.

  I knew I would not find it.

  Someone had taken it.

  And whoever had peeled it off the photo had telephoned and sent a message to Cal. You are known! You are naked! You are revealed! I remembered Cal’s phone ringing. And Cal, afraid, refusing to answer.

  And coming into his barber shop, what? Two days, three days ago, casually checking the photograph, Cal had been kicked in the gut. With Joplin’s head gone, Cal was gone.

  All he could do was Goodwill the barber chair. Salvation Army the tonics, piano me his piano.

  I stopped searching. I folded the photograph of Cal without Joplin and went out to watch the landlord broom the hairless tiles.

  “Cal,” I said.

  The landlord paused his broom.

  “Cal didn’t,” I said. “I mean, Cal wouldn’t, I mean, Cal’s still alive?”

  “Crud,” said the landlord. “Alive about four hundred miles east of here by now, still owing seven months’ rent.”

  Thank God. I won’t have to tell Crumley about this one. Not now, anyway. Going away isn’t murder, or being murdered.

  No?

  Going east? Isn’t Cal a dead man, driving a car?

  I went out the door.

  “Boy,” said the landlord. “You look bad coming and going.”

  Not as bad as some people, I thought.

  Where do I go now? I wondered, now that the smile is there, filling up my bed-sitting-room and me only able to play an Underwood Standard?

  The gas station telephone rang at two-thirty that afternoon. Exhausted by no sleep the night before, I had gone back to bed.

  I lay listening.

  The phone wouldn’t stop.

  It rang for two minutes and then three. The more it rang, the colder I got. By the time I lunged out of bed and floundered into my bathing trunks and trudged across the street, I was shuddering like someone in a snowstorm.

  When I lifted the receiver, I could feel Crumley a long way off at the far end, and without his speaking I could guess his news.

  “It’s happened, hasn’t it?” I said.

  “How aid you know?” Crumley sounded as if he had been up all night, too.

  “What made you go by there?’’ I asked.

  “While I was shaving an hour ago, I had a hunch, Jesus, like the ones you talk about. I’m still here, waiting for the coroner. You coming by to say I told you so?”

  “No, but I’D be there.”

  I hung up.

  Back in my apartment, Nothing still hung on the hall door leading to the bathroom. I yanked it off the door, hurled it to the floor, and stepped on it. It seemed only right, since it had gone off during the night to visit the canary lady and come back without telling me, just before dawn.

  Christ, I thought, standing numbly on the bathrobe, all the cages are empty now!

  Crumley stood on one side of the Lower Nile, the dry riverbed. I stood on the other. One police car and the morgue van were waiting downstairs.

  “You’re not going to like this,” said Crumley.

  He paused, waiting for me to nod him to pull back the sheet. I said, “Did you call me in the middle of the night?”

  Crumley shook his head.

  “How long has she been dead?”

  “We figure about eleven hours.”

  I ran my thoughts back. Four in the morning. When the phone had rung across the street in the night. When Nothing had called to tell me something. If I had run to answer, a cold wind would have blown out of the receiver to tell me—this.

  I nodded. Crumley pulled back the sheet.

  The canaries-for-sale lady was there and not there. Part of her had fled in the dark. What was left was terrible to see.

  Her eyes were fixed on some dreadful Nothing, the thing on the top of my hall door, the invisible weight at the end of my bed. The mouth that had once whispered open, saying, come up, come in, welcome, was now gaped in shock, in protest. It wanted something to go away, get out, not stay!

  Holding the sheet in his fingers, Crumley glanced at me.

  “I guess I owe you an apology.”

  “For what?”

  It was hard to talk, for she was staring up between us at some terror on the ceiling.

  “For guessing right, that was you. For doubting, that was me.”

  “It wasn’t hard to guess. That’s my brother, dead. That’s my grandfather and my aunts dead. And my mother and father. All deaths are the same, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah.” Crumley let the sheet drift down, a snowfall over the Nile Valley on an autumn day. “But this is just a simple death, kid. Not a murder. That look on her face you can find on all lands of people when they feel their heart coming out of their chest with an attack.”

  I wanted to shout arguments. I bit my tongue. Something seen from the corner of my eye made me turn away and move over to the empty birdcages. It took a few moments for me to see what I was looking at:

  “Jesus,” I whispered. “Hirohito. Addis Ababa. They’re gone.”

  I turned to stare at Crumley and point.

  “Someone’s taken the old newspaper headlines out of the cages. Whoever came up here not only scared her to death, but took the papers. My God, he’s a souvenir collector. I bet he’s got a pocketful of train ticket punchout confetti and Scott Joplin’s peeled-off head, too.”

  “Scott Joplin’s what?”

  He didn’t want to, but at last Crumley came to look at the bottoms of the cages.

  “Find those newspapers and you’ll find him,” I said.

  “Easy as pie.” Crumley sighed.

  He led me down past the turned-to-the-wall mirrors that had not seen anyone come up during the night and did not see him go. In the downstairs stairwell area was the dusty window with the sign in it. For no reason I could figure, I reached out and pulled the sign away from its flaking Scotch-taped frame. Crumley was watching me.

  “Can I have this?” I asked.

  “It’ll hurt you, every time you look at it,” said Crumley. “Oh, hell. Keep it.”

  I folded it and tucked it in my pocket.

  Upstairs, the birdcages sang no songs.

  The coroner stepped in, full of mid-afternoon beer and whistling.

  It had begun to rain. It rained all across Venice as Crumley’s car drove us away from her house, away from my house, away from phones that rang at the wrong hours, away from the gray sea and the empty snore and the remembrance of drowned swimmers. The car windshield was like a great eye, weeping and drying itself, weeping again, as the wiper shuttled and stopped, shuttled and stopped and squeaked to shuttle again. I stared straight ahead.

  Inside his jungle bungalow, Crumley looked in my face, guessed at a brandy instead of a beer, gave me that, and nodded at the telephone in his bedroom.

  “You got any money to call Mexico City?”

  I shook my
head.

  “Now you have,” said Crumley. “Call. Talk to your girl. Shut the door and talk.”

  I grabbed his hand and almost broke every bone in it, gasping. Then I called Mexico.

  “Peg!”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, me!

  “My God, you sound so strange, so far away.”

  “I am far away.”

  “You’re alive, thank God.”

  “Sure.”

  “I had this terrible feeling last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What time. Peg, what time?”

  “Four o’clock, why?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing. I couldn’t sleep either. How’s Mexico City?”

  “Full of death.”

  “God, I thought it was all here.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Lord, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Say something.”

  I said something.

  “Say it again!”

  “Why are you shouting, Peg?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I do. When are you going to ask me to marry you, damn it!”

  “Peg,” I said, in dismay.

  “Well, when?”

  “On thirty dollars a week, forty when I’m lucky, some weeks nothing, some months not a damn thing?”

  “I’ll take a vow of poverty.”

  “Sure.”

  “I will. I’ll be home in ten days and take both vows.”

  “Ten days, ten years.”

  “Why do women always have to ask men for their hands?”

  “Because we’re cowards and more afraid than you.”

  “I’ll protect you.”

  “Some conversation this.” I thought of the door last night and the thing hanging on the door and the thing on the end of my bed. “You’d better hurry.”

  “Do you remember my face?” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You do remember it, don’t you, because, God, just an hour ago this terrible, horrible thing happened, I couldn’t remember yours, or the color of your eyes, and I realized what a dumb fool I was not to bring your picture along, and it was all gone. That scares me, to think I could forget. You’ll never forget me, will you?”

  I didn’t tell her I had forgotten the color of her eyes just the day before and how that had shaken me for an hour and that it was a kind of death but me not being able to figure who had died first. Peg or me.