Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  “Does my voice help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I there with you? Do you see my eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “For God’s sake, first thing you do when you hang up, mail me a picture. I don’t want to be afraid any more—”

  “All I have is a lousy twenty-five-cent photo machine picture I—”

  “Send it!”

  “I should never have come down here and left you alone up there, unprotected.”

  “You make me sound like your kid.”

  “What else are you?”

  “I don’t know. Can love protect people, Peg?”

  “It must. If it doesn’t protect you, I’ll never forgive God. Let’s keep talking. As long as we talk, love’s there and you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay already. You’ve made me well. I was sick today, Peg. Nothing serious. Something I ate. But I’m right now.”

  “I’m moving in with you when I get home, no matter what you say. If we get married, fine. You’ll just have to get used to my working while you finish the Great American Epic, and to hell with it, shut up. Someday, later on, you support me!”

  “Are you ordering me around?”

  “Sure, because I hate to hang up and I just want this to go on all day and I know it’s costing you a mint. Say some more, the things I want to hear.”

  I said some more.

  And she was gone, the telephone line humming and me left with a piece of wire cable two thousand miles long and a billion shadow whispers lingering there, heading toward me. I cut them off before they could reach my ear and slide inside my head.

  I opened the door and stepped out to find Crumley waiting by the icebox, reaching in for sustenance.

  “You look surprised?” He laughed. “Forget you were in my house, you were so busy yakking?”

  “Forgot,” I said.

  And took anything he handed me, out of the fridge, my nose running, my cold making me miserable.

  “Grab some Kleenex, kid,” said Crumley. “Take the whole box.

  “And while you’re at it,” he added, “give me the rest of your list.”

  “Our list,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes, wiped his balding head with a nervous hand, and nodded.

  “Those who will die next, in order of execution.”

  He shut his eyes, heavily burdened.

  “Our list,” he said.

  I did not immediately tell him about Cal.

  “And while you’re at it”—Crumley sipped another beer— “write down the name of the murderer.”

  “It would have to be someone who knows everyone in Venice, California,” I said.

  “That could be me,” said Crumley.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” I said, “it scares me.”

  I made the list.

  I made two lists.

  And then suddenly discovered myself making three.

  The first list was short and full of possible murderers, none of which I believed.

  The second was Choose Your Victim, and went on at some length, on who would vanish in short order.

  And in the middle of it I realized it had been some while since I trapped all the wandering people of Venice. So I did a page on Cal the barber before he fled out of my mind, and another on Shrank running down the street, and another on all those people on the rollercoaster with me plummeting into hell, and yet another on the big night steamboat theater crossing the Styx to ram the Isle of the Dead and (unthinkable!) sink Mr. Shapeshade!

  I did a final sermon on Miss Birdsong, and a page about the glass eyes, and took all these pages and put them in my Talking Box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings to tell me where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. I lay half-asleep, listening, and then got up and went to help them, with my typewriter, to go where they most needed to go to do some special wild thing; so my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backward. Sometimes it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen. Sometimes it was me, missing Peg in my tombstone bed.

  I took one of the lists back to Crumley.

  “How come you didn’t use my typewriter?” said Crumley.

  “Yours isn’t used to me yet, and would only get in the way. Mine is way ahead of me, and I run to catch up. Read that.”

  Crumley read my list of possible victims.

  “Christ,” he murmured, “you got half the Venice Chamber of Commerce, the Lions Club, the flea circus, and the Pier Carnival Owners of America on here.”

  He folded it and put it in his pocket.

  “Why don’t you throw in some friends from where you once lived in downtown L.A.?”

  An ice-frog jumped in my chest.

  I thought of the tenement and the dark halls and nice Mrs. Gutierrez and lovely Fannie.

  The frog jumped again.

  “Don’t say that,” I said.

  “Where’s the other list, of murderers? You got the Chamber of Commerce on that, too?”

  I shook my head.

  “Afraid to show it to me because I’m in the lineup with the rest of them?” asked Crumley.

  I took that list out of my pocket, glanced at it, and tore it up.

  “Where’s your wastebasket?” I said.

  Even as I had been talking, the fog had arrived across the street from Crumley’s. It hesitated, as if searching for me, and then, to verify my paranoid suspicions, sneaked across and blanketed his garden, dousing the Christmas lights in his oranges and lemons and drowning the flowers so they shut their mouths.

  “How dare it come here?” I said.

  “Everything does,” said Crumley.

  “Qué? Is this the Crazy?”

  “Sí, Mrs. Gutierrez.”

  “Do I call the office?”

  “Sí Mrs. Gutierrez.”

  “Fannie is calling outside on her porch!”

  “I hear her, Mrs. Gutierrez—”

  Far away in the sun inland where there was no fog or mist or rain, and no surf to bring strange visitors in, was the tenement, and Fannie’s soprano calling like the Sirens.

  “Tell him,” I heard her sing, “I have a new recording of Mozart’s The Magic Flute!”

  “She says—”

  “Her voice carries, Mrs. Gutierrez. Tell her, thank God, that’s a happy one.”

  “She wants you to come see, she misses you and hopes you forgive her, she says.”

  For what? I tried to remember.

  “She says—”

  Fannie’s voice floated on the warm clear air.

  “Tell him to come but don’t bring anyone with!”

  That knocked the air out of me. The ghosts of old ice creams rose in my blood. When had I ever done that? I wondered. Who did she think I might bring along, uninvited?

  And then I remembered.

  The bathrobe hanging on the door late nights. Leave it there. Canaries for sale. Don’t fetch the empty cages. The lion cage. Don’t roll it through the streets. Lon Chaney. Don’t peel him off the silver screen and hide him in your pocket. Don’t.

  My God, Fannie, I thought, is the fog rolling inland toward you? Will the mist reach your tenement? Will the rain touch on your door?

  I shouted so loudly over the phone, Fannie could have heard it, downstairs.

  “Tell her, Mrs. Gutierrez, I come alone. Alone. But tell her only maybe I come. I have no money, not even for train fare. Maybe I come tomorrow—”

  “Fannie say, if you come, she give you money.”

  “Swell, but meantime, my pockets, empty.”

  Just then I saw the postman cross the street and stick an envelope in my mailbox.

  “Hold on,” I yelled, and ran.

  The letter was from New York with a check for thirty dollars in it for a story I had just sold to Bizarre Tales, about a man who feared the wind
that followed him around the world from the Himalayas and now shook his house late at night, hungry for his soul.

  I ran back to the telephone and shouted, “If I make it to the bank—tonight I will come!”

  Fannie got the translation and sang three notes from the “Bell Song” from Lakmé before her translator hung up.

  I ran for the bank.

  Graveyard fog, I thought, don’t get on the train ahead of me, headed for Fannie.

  If the pier was a great Titanic on its way to meet an iceberg in the night, with people busy rearranging the deck chairs, and someone singing “Nearer My God to Thee” as he rammed the plunger on the TNT detonator …

  Then the tenement at the corner of Temple and Figueroa was still afloat down the middle of the barrio, with curtains, people, and underwear hanging out of most windows, laundry being churned to death in back-porch machines, and the smell of tacos and delicatessen corned beef in the halls.

  All to itself it was a small Ellis Island, adrift with people from some sixteen countries. On Saturday nights there were enchilada festivals on the top floor and conga lines dancing through the halls, but most of the week the doors were shut and people turned in early because they all worked, downtown in the dress lofts or the dime stores or in what was left of the defense industry in the valley or in Olvera Street selling junk jewelry.

  Nobody was in charge of the tenement. The landlady, Mrs. O’Brien, came to visit as rarely as possible; fearful of purse snatchers, terrified for her seventy-two-year-old virtue. If anyone was in charge of the tenement it was Fannie Florianna, who from her second-floor opera balcony could singsong orders so sweetly that even the boys in the poolhall across the street stopped preening like pigeons and roosters and came, cues in hand, to wave up and cry “Olé!”

  There were three Chinese on the first floor along with the usual Chicanos, and on the second floor one Japanese gentleman and six young men from Mexico City who owned one white ice cream suit—each got to wear it one night a week. There were also some Portuguese men, a night watchman from Haiti, two salesmen from the Philippines, and more Chicanos. Mrs. Gutierrez, with the only phone in the tenement, was there, yes, on the third floor.

  The second was mostly Fannie and her 380 pounds, along with two old maid sisters from Spain, a jewelry salesman from Egypt, and two ladies from Monterey who, it was rumored, sold their favors at no great price, to any lost and lustful pool player who happened to stumble upstairs, uncaring, late Friday nights. Every rat to his warren, as Fannie said.

  I was glad to stand outside the tenement at dusk, glad to hear all the live radios playing from all the windows, glad to smell all the cooking smells and hear the laughter.

  Glad to go in and meet all the people.

  Some people’s lives can be summed so swiftly it’s no more than a door slammed or someone coughing out on a dark street late at night.

  You glance from the window; the street’s empty. Whoever coughed is gone.

  There are some people who live to be thirty-five or forty, but because no one ever notices, their lives are candle-brief, invisible-small.

  In and around the tenement were various such invisible or half-visible people who lived but did not exactly live in the tenement.

  There was Sam and there was Jimmy and there was Pietro Massinello and there was the very special blind man, Henry, as dark as the halls he wandered through with his Negro pride.

  All or most of them would vanish in a few days, and each in a different way. Since their vanishing occurred with such regularity and variety, no one took notice. Even I almost missed the significance of their last farewells.

  Sam.

  Sam was a wetback wandered up from Mexico to wash dishes, beg quarters, buy cheap wine, and lie doggo for days, then up like the night-prowling dead to wash more dishes, cadge more quarters, and sink into vino, toted in a brown-bag valise. His Spanish was bad and his English worse because it was always filtered through muscatel. Nobody knew what he said, nobody cared. He slept in the basement, out of harm’s way.

  So much for Sam.

  Jimmy you couldn’t understand either, not as a result of wine but because someone had stolen his bite. His teeth, delivered gratis by the city’s health department, had vanished one night when he was careless enough to dime himself into a Main Street flophouse. The teeth had been stolen from a water glass by his pillow. When he woke his great white grin was gone forever. Jimmy, gape-mouthed but convivial on gin, came back to the tenement, pointing at his pink gums and laughing. And what with the loss of his dentures and his immigrant Czech accent, he was, like Sam, unintelligible. He slept in empty tenement bathtubs at three in the morning, and did odd jobs around the place each day, laughing a lot at nothing in particular.

  So much for Jimmy.

  Pietro Massinello was a circus of one, allowed, like the others, to move his feast of dogs, cats, geese, and parakeets from the roof, where they lived in summer, to a basement lumber room in December, where they survived in a medley of barks, cackles, riots, and slumbers through the years. You could see him running along Los Angeles streets with his herd of adoring beasts in his wake, the dogs frisking, a bird on each shoulder, a duck pursuing, as he toted a portable windup phonograph which he set down at street corners to play Tales from the Vienna Woods and dance his dogs for whatever people threw him. He was a tiny man with bells on his hat, black mascara around his wide innocent mad eyes, and chimes sewn on his cuffs and lapels. He did not speak to people, he sang.

  The sign outside his lean-to basement lumber room read MANGER, and love filled the place, the love of beautifully treated and petted and spoiled animals for their incredible master.

  So much for Retro Massinello.

  Henry, the blind colored man, was even more special. Special because he not only spoke clean and clear, but walked without canes through our lives and survived when the others had gone, without trumpets, off in the night.

  He was waiting for me when I came in the downstairs entrance to the tenement.

  He was waiting for me in the dark, hid back against the wall, his face so black it was unseen.

  It was his eyes, blind but white rimmed, which startled me.

  I jumped and gasped.

  “Henry. Is that you?”

  “Scare you, did I?” Henry smiled, then remembered why he was there. “I been waiting on you,” he said, lowering his voice, looking around as if he could actually see the shadows.

  “Something wrong, Henry?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. Things is changing. The old place ain’t the same. People is nervous. Even me.”

  I saw his right hand fumble down in the dark to touch and twitch a peppermint-striped cane. I had never seen him carry a cane before. My eye ran down to the tip, which was rounded with what looked to be a good weight of lead. It was not a blind man’s guide. It was a weapon.

  “Henry,” I whispered.

  And we stood for a moment while I looked him over and saw what had always been there.

  Blind Henry.

  He had everything memorized. In his pride he had counted and could recall every pace in this block and the next and the next, and how many steps across at this intersection or that. And he could name the streets he strode past, with sovereign certainty, by the butcher or shoeshine or drugstore or poolhall smokes and smells. And even when the shops were shut, he would “see” the kosher pickle scents or the boxed tobaccos, or the locked-away African ivory aromas of the billiard balls in their nests, or the aphrodisiac whiff from the gas station when some tank flooded, and Henry walking, staring straight ahead, no dark glasses, no cane, his mouth counting the beats, to turn in at Al’s Beer and walk steadily and unswervingly through the crowded tables toward an empty piano stool, there to sit and reach up for the beer that was automatically popped in place by Al before his arrival, to play exactly three tunes—including the “Maple Leaf” sadly better than Cal the barber—drink the one beer, and stride out into a night he owned with his paces and counts, heading
home, calling out to unseen voices, naming names, proud of his shuttered genius, only his nose steering the way and his legs firm and muscled from the ten miles of strides per day.

  If you tried to help him across the street, which I made the mistake of doing once, he yanked his elbow away and stared at you so angrily that your face burned.

  “Don’t touch,” he whispered. “Don’t confuse. You put me off now. Where was I?” He threw some abacus beads in his dark head. He counted cornrows on his skull. “Yeah. Now. Thirty-five across, thirty-seven over.” And on he went alone, leaving you on the curb, his own parade, thirty-five steps across Temple this way, and thirty-seven the other, across Figueroa. An invisible cane tapped cadence for him. He marched, by God, he truly marched.

  And it was Henry with No Last Name, Henry the Blind who heard the wind and knew the cracks in the sidewalk and snuffed the dust of the night tenement, who gave the first warnings of things waiting on the stairs or too much midnight leaning heavy on the roof, or a wrong perspiration in the halls.

  And here he was now, flattened back against the cracked plaster of the tenement entryway, with full night outside and in the halls. His eyes wobbled and shut, his nostrils flared, he seemed to bend a bit at the knees as if someone had struck him on the head. His cane twitched in his dark fingers. He listened, listened so hard that I turned to stare down the long cavernous hall to the far end of the tenement where the back door stood wide and more night waited.

  “What’s wrong, Henry?” I said again.

  “Promise you won’t tell Florianna? Fannie takes on fits, you tell her too much wrong stuff. Promise?”

  “I won’t give her fits, Henry.”

  “Where you been last few days?”

  “I had my own troubles, Henry, and I was broke. I could have hitchhiked in, but—well.”

  “Lots goes on in just forty-eight hours. Pietro, him and his dogs and birds and geese, you know his cats?”