Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  “What about Pietro?”

  “Someone turned him in, called the police. Nuisance, they said. Police come, take all his pets away, take him away. He was able to give some of them to folks. I got his cat up in my room. Mrs. Gutierrez got a new dog. When they led him out, Pietro, he was crying. I never heard a man cry so hard before. It was terrible.”

  “Who turned him in, Henry?” I was upset myself. I saw the dogs adoring Pietro, I saw the cats and the geese that lovingly followed and the canaries on his bell-chiming hat and him dancing on street corners through half of my life.

  “Who turned him in?”

  “Trouble is, no one knows. Cops just come and said, ‘Here!’ and all the pets gone forever and Pietro in jail, a nuisance, or maybe he kicked up a fuss out front there, hit somebody, striking a cop. Nobody knows. But somebody did. That ain’t all—”

  “What else?” I said, leaning against the wall.

  “Sam.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s in the hospital. Booze. Someone gave him two quarts of the hard stuff; damn fool drank it all. What they call it? Acute alcoholism? If he lives tomorrow, it’s God’s will. No one knows who gave him the booze. Then there’s Jimmy, that’s the worst!”

  “God,” I whispered. “Let me sit down.” I sat on the edge of the steps leading up to the second floor. “No News or What Killed the Dog.”

  “Huh?”

  “An old seventy-eight rpm record when I was a kid. ‘No News or What Killed the Dog.’ Dog ate burned horseflakes from the burned-down barn. How did the barn burn down? Sparks from the house blew over and burned down the barn. Sparks from the house? From inside the house, the candles around the coffin. Candles around the coffin? Someone’s uncle died. On and on. It all ends with the dog in the barn eating the burned horseflakes and dying. Or, ‘No News or What Killed the Dog.’ Your stories are getting to me, Henry. Sorry.”

  “Sorry is right. Jimmy, now. You know how he sleeps from floor to floor nights, and once a week he just up and strips down and takes a bath in the third-floor tub? Or the first-floor washroom? Sure! Well last night he got in the full tub, drunk, turned over, and drowned.”

  “Drowned!”

  “Drowned. Ain’t that silly. Ain’t that a terrible thing to put on your obit-tombstone, save he won’t have a tombstone. Potter’s field. Found in a bathtub of dirty water. Turned over, so drunk he slept himself into the grave. And him with new false teeth just this week. And the teeth gone, how you figure that, when they found him in the tub! Drowned.”

  “Oh my Christ,” I said, stifling a laugh and a sob in one.

  “Yes, name Christ, God help us all.” Henry’s voice trembled. “Now, you see what I don’t want you to tell Fannie? We’ll let her know, one at a time, spread it out over weeks. Retro Massinello in jail, his dogs lost forever, his cats driven away, his geese cooked. Sam in the hospital. Jimmy drowned. And me? Looky this handkerchief, all wet from my eyes, balled in my fist. I don’t feel so good.”

  “Nobody’s feeling very good, right now.”

  “Now.” Henry put his hand out, unerringly toward my voice and took hold of my shoulder gently. “Go on up, and be cheerful. With Fannie.”

  I tapped on Fannie’s door.

  “Thank God,” I heard her cry.

  A steamboat came upriver, flung wide the door, and churned back downstream over the linoleum.

  When Fannie had crashed into her chair she looked into my face and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Oh.” I turned to blink at the doorknob in my hand. “Do you leave your door unlocked all the time?”

  “Why not? Who would want to come in and storm the Bastille?” But she did not laugh. She was watchful. Like Henry, she had a powerful nose. And I was perspiring.

  I shut the door and sank into a chair.

  “Who died?” said Fannie.

  “What do you mean, who died?” I stammered.

  “You look like you just came back from a Chinese funeral and were hungry all over again.” She tried to smile and blinky-blink her eyes.

  “Oh.” I thought quickly. “Henry just scared me in the hall, is all. You know Henry. You come along a hall and can’t see him for the night.”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” said Fannie. “Where have you been? I am exhausted, waiting for you to come visit. Are you ever tired, just worn out, with waiting? I’ve waited, dear young man, fearful for you. Have you been sad?”

  “Very sad, Fannie.”

  “There. I knew it. It was that dreadful old man in the lion cage, wasn’t it? How dare he make you sad?”

  “He couldn’t help it, Fannie.” I sighed. “I imagine he would much rather have been down at the Pacific Electric ticket office counting the punch-confetti on his vest.”

  “Well, Fannie will cheer you up. Would you put the needle on the record there, my dear? Yes, that’s it. Mozart to dance and sing to. We must invite Pietro Massinello up, mustn’t we, some day soon. The Magic Flute is just his cup of tea, and let him bring his pets.”

  “Yes, Fannie,” I said.

  I put the needle on a record which hissed with promise.

  “Poor boy,” said Fannie. “You do look sad.”

  There was a faint scratching on the door.

  “That’s Henry,” said Fannie. “He never knocks.”

  I went to the door but before I could open it, Henry’s voice behind it said, “Only me.”

  I opened the door and Henry sniffed. “Spearmint gum. That’s how I know you. You ever chew anything else?”

  “Not even tobacco.”

  “Your cab’s here,” said Henry.

  “My what?”

  “Since when can you afford a taxi?” asked Fannie, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. We had had a glorious two hours with Mozart and the very air was luminous around the big lady. “So?”

  “Yeah, since when can I afford—” I said, but stopped, for Henry, outside the door, was shaking his head once: no. His finger went to his lips with caution.

  “It’s your friend,” he said. “Taxi driver knows you, from Venice. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, frowning. “If you say so.”

  “Oh, and here. This is for Fannie. Pietro said give it over. He’s so crammed full downstairs, no room for this.”

  He handed over a plump purring calico cat.

  I took and carried the sweet burden back to Fannie, who began to purr herself when she held the beast.

  “Oh, my dear!” she cried, happy with Mozart and calico. “What a dream cat, what a dream!”

  Henry nodded to her, nodded to me, and went away down the hall.

  I went to give Fannie a big hug.

  “Listen, oh listen to his motor,” she cried, holding the pillow cat up for a kiss.

  “Lock your door, Fannie,” I said.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  Coming back downstairs, I found Henry still waiting in the dark, halt-hidden against the wall.

  “Henry, for God’s sake, what’re you doing?”

  “Listening,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “This house, this place. Shh. Careful. Now.”

  His cane came up and pointed like an antenna along the hall.

  “There. You—hear?”

  Far away a wind stirred. Far away a breeze wandered the dark. The beams settled. Someone breathed. A door creaked.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s ’cause you trying. Don’t try. Just be. Just listen. Now.”

  I listened and my spine chilled.

  “Someone in this house,” whispered Henry. “Don’t belong here. I got this sense. I’m no fool. Someone up there, wandering around, up to no good.”

  “Can’t be, Henry.”

  “Is,” he whispered. “A blind man tells you. Stranger underfoot. Henry has the word. You don’t hear me, you fall downstairs or—”

  Drown in a bathtub, I thought. But what I said was, “You going to stay here all ni
ght?”

  “Someone’s got to stand guard.”

  A blind man? I thought.

  He read my mind. He nodded. “Old Henry, sure. Now run along. It’s a big fancy-smelling Duesenberg out front. No taxi. I lied. Who would be picking you up this late, know anyone with a fancy car?”

  “No one.”

  “Get on out. I’ll mind Fannie for us. But who’ll mind Jimmy now, not even Jim. Not even Sam—”

  I started out from one night into another.

  “Oh, one last thing.”

  I paused. Henry said:

  “What was the bad news you brought tonight and didn’t tell? Not to me. Not to Fannie.”

  I gasped.

  “How did you know?”

  I thought of the old woman sinking in the riverbed, silent, in her sheets, out of sight. I thought of Cal, the piano lid slammed on his maple leaf hands.

  “Even though,” explained Henry with good reason, “you chew spearmint gum, your breath was sour tonight, young sir. Which means you’re not digesting your food proper. Which means a bad day for writers come inland with no roots.”

  “It was a bad day for everyone, Henry.”

  “I’m still huffing and puffing.” Henry stood tall and shook his cane at the darkening halls where the lightbulbs were burning out and the souls were guttering low. “Watchdog Henry. You, now—git!”

  I went out the door toward something that not only smelled but looked like a 1928 Duesenberg.

  It was Constance Rattigan’s limousine.

  It was as long and bright and beautiful as a Fifth Avenue shop window somehow arrived on the wrong side of L.A.

  The back door of the limo was open. The chauffeur was in the front seat, hat crammed down over his eyes, staring straight ahead. He didn’t look at me. I tried to get his attention, but the limousine was waiting, its motor humming, and I was wasting time.

  I had never been in such a vehicle in my life.

  It might be my one and only chance.

  I leaped in.

  No sooner had I hit the back seat than the limousine swerved in one boa-constrictor glide away from the curb. The back door slammed shut on me and we were up to sixty by the time we reached the end of the block. Tearing up Temple Hill we made something like seventy-five. We managed to make all of the green lights to Vermont where we wheeled over to Wilshire and took it out as far as Westwood for no special reason, maybe because it was scenic.

  I sat in the back seat like Robert Armstrong on King Kong’s lap, crowing and babbling to myself, knowing where I was going but wondering why I deserved all this.

  Then I remembered the nights when I had come up to call on Fannie and met this very same smell of Chanel and leather and Paris nights in the air outside her door. Constance Rattigan had been there only a few minutes before. We had missed colliding by one or two hairs of mink and an exhalation of Grand Marnier.

  As we prepared to turn at Westwood we passed a cemetery which was so placed that if you weren’t careful, you drove into a parking lot. Or was it that some days, looking for a parking lot, you mistakenly motored between tombstones? A confusion.

  Before I could give it great mind, the cemetery and the parking lot were left behind and we were halfway to the sea.

  At Venice and Windward we wheeled south along the shore. We passed like a slight rainfall, that quiet and swift, not far from my small apartment. I saw my typewriter window lit with a faint light. I wonder if I am in there, dreaming this? I thought. And we left behind my deserted office telephone booth with Peg two thousand miles away at the end of the silent line. Peg, I thought, if you could see me now!

  We swerved in behind the big, bone-white Moorish fort at exactly midnight and the limousine stopped as easily as a wave sinks in sand and the limo door banged and the chauffeur, still quiet after the long, silent glide, streaked into the backside of le fort and did not appear again.

  I waited a full minute for something to happen. When it did not, I slid out of the back of the limousine, like a shoplifter, guilty for no reason and wondering whether to escape.

  I saw a dark figure upstairs in the house. Lights went on as the chauffeur moved about the Moorish fort on the Venice sands.

  I stayed quietly, anyway. I looked at my watch. As the minute hand counted on the last second of the last minute, the front portico lights went on.

  I walked up to the open front door and stepped into an empty house. At a distance down a hall I saw a small figure darting about the kitchen making drinks. A small girl in a maid’s outfit. She waved at me and ran.

  I walked into a living room filled with a menagerie of pillows of every size from Pomeranian to Great Dane. I sat on the biggest one and sank down even as my soul kept sinking in me.

  The maid ran in, put down two drinks on a tray, and ran out before I could see her (there was only candlelight in this room). Over her shoulder she threw away “Drink!” in what was or was not a French accent.

  It was a cool white wine and a good one and I needed it. My cold was worse. I was sneezing and honking and sneezing all the time.

  In the year 2078 they excavated an old tomb or what they thought to be a tomb on the shoreline of California where, it was rumored, queens and kings once ruled, then went away with the tides along the flats. Some were buried with their chariots, it was said. Some with relics of their arrogance and magnificence. Some left behind only images of themselves in strange canisters which, held to the light and spun on a shuttle, talked in tongues and tossed black-and-white shadow-shows on empty tapestry screens.

  One of the tombs found and opened was the tomb of a queen and in that vault was not a speck of dust, nor furniture, just pillows in mid-floor and all around, row on row, rising to the ceiling, and stack on stack, reaching to touch that ceiling, canisters labeled with the lives that the queen had lived and none of these lives were true but they seemed true. They were tinned and prisoned dreams. They were containers from which djinns screamed forth or into which princesses fled to hide for eternity from the reality that killed.

  And the address of the tomb was 27 Speedway, Ocean Front, Venice, California, in a lost year under sand and water. And the name of the queen with her film in cans from floor to roof was Rattigan.

  And I was there now, waiting and thinking:

  I hope she’s not like the canary lady. I hope she’s not a mummy with dust in her eyes.

  I stopped hoping.

  The second Egyptian queen had arrived. And not with a grand entrance at all, and she wasn’t wearing a silver lamé evening gown, or even a smart dress and scarf or tailored slacks.

  I felt her in the door across the room before she spoke, and what was she? A woman about five feet tall, in a black bathing suit, incredibly suntanned all over her body, and with a face dark as nutmeg and cinnamon. Her hair was cropped and a kind of blonde gray brown and tousled as if, what the hell, she had given it a try with a comb and let it go. The body was neat and firm and quick, and the tendons of her legs had not been cut. She ran quickly, barefoot, across the floor and stood looking down at me with flashing eyes.

  “You a good swimmer?”

  “Not bad.”

  “How many laps of my pool could you do?” She nodded to the great emerald lake outside the French doors.

  “Twenty.”

  “I can go forty-five. Any man I know has got to do forty, before he goes to bed with me.”

  “I just flunked the test,” I said.

  “Constance Rattigan.” She grabbed my hand and pumped it.

  “I know,” I said.

  She stood back and eyed me up and down.

  “So you’re the one who chews spearmint and likes Tosca,” she said.

  “You been talking to both Henry the blind man and Florianna?”

  “Right! Wait here. If I don’t have my night dip, I’ll go to sleep on you.”

  Before I could speak, she plunged out the French doors, skirted the pool, and headed for the ocean. She vanished into the first wave and swam out of s
ight.

  I had a feeling she wouldn’t want wine when she came back. I wandered out to the kitchen, which was Dutch, cream white, sky blue, and found a percolator in full perk, and the smell of coffee brewing for the start of a new day. I checked my cheap watch: almost one in the morning. I poured coffee for two and took it out to wait for her on the veranda overlooking the incredibly greeny-blue swimming pool.

  “Yes!” was her answer as she ran to shake herself like a dog on the tiles.

  She grabbed the coffee and should have burned her mouth drinking it. Between gasps she said, “This starts my day.”

  “What time do you go to bed?”

  “Sunrise, sometimes, like the vampires. Noon’s not for me.”

  “How do you get such a tan?”

  “Sunlamp in the basement. Why are you staring?”

  “Because,” I said. “You’re so different from the way I thought you would be. I imagined someone like Norma Desmond in that movie that just came out. You see it?”

  “Hell, I lived it. Half of the film’s me, the rest bilge. That dimwit Norma wants a new career. All I want most days is to hole up and not come out. I’ve had it with his-hand-on-my-knee producers and mattress-spring directors, timid writers, and cowardly scripts. No offense. You a writer?”

  “I damn well am.”

  “You got spunk, kid. Stay away from films. They’ll screw you. Where was I? Oh, yeah, I gave most of my fancy gowns to Hollywood Volunteer Sales years ago. I go to maybe one premiere a year, disguised as someone else. Once every eight weeks, if it’s some old chum, I have lunch at Sardi’s or the Derby, then hole in again. Fannie I see about once a month, usually around this time. She’s a night-owl like yours truly.”

  She finished her coffee and toweled herself off with a huge soft yellow towel that went well with her dark tan. She draped it over her shoulders and gave me another stare. I had time to study this woman who was and wasn’t Constance Rattigan, the great empress from my childhood. On screen, twenty feet of gliding, villainous, man-trapping woman, dark haired, ravishing in her slenderness. Here, a sunblasted desert mouse, quick, nimble, ageless, all cinnamon and nutmeg and honey as we stood in the night wind out in front of her mosque by her Mediterranean pool. I looked at that house and thought, no radios, no television, no newspapers. She was quick with her telepathy.