Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  I ran out and dove in and swam halfway to her before I was exhausted. No athlete this. I turned back and sat waiting for her on the shore. She came in at last and stood over me, stark naked this time.

  “Christ,” she said, “you didn’t even take off your underwear. What’s happened to modern youth?”

  I was staring at her body.

  “How you like it? Pretty good for an old empress, huh? Good buzz-um, tight rump, marceled pubic hairs—”

  But I had shut my eyes. She giggled. Then she was gone, laughing. She ran up the beach half a mile and came back, having startled only the gulls.

  Next thing I knew the smell of coffee blew along the shore, with the scent of fresh toast. When I dragged myself inside she was seated in the kitchen, wearing only the mascara she had painted around her eyes a moment before. Blinking rapidly at me, like some silent screen farm girl, she handed me jam and toast, and draped a napkin daintily over her lap, so as not to offend while I stared and ate. She got strawberry jam on the tip of her left breast. I saw this. She saw me seeing this and said, “Hungry?”

  Which made me butter my toast all the faster.

  “Good grief, go call Mexico City.”

  I called.

  “Where are you?” demanded Peg’s voice, two thousand miles away.

  “In a phone booth, in Venice, and it’s raining,” I said.

  “Liar!” said Peg.

  And she was right.

  And then, quite suddenly, it was over.

  It was very late, or very early. I felt drunk on life, just because this woman had taken time to play through the hours, talk through the darkness until the sun, way over in the east, beyond the fogs and mists, threatened to appear.

  I looked out at the surf and shore. Not a sign of bodies drowned, and no one on the sand to know or not know. I didn’t want to go but I had a full day’s work ahead, writing my stories just three steps ahead of death. A day without writing, I often said, and said it so many times my friends sighed and rolled their eyeballs, a day without writing was a little death. I did not intend to pitch me over the graveyard wall. I would fight all the way with my Underwood Standard which shoots more squarely, if you aim it right, than any rifle ever invented.

  “I’ll drive you home,” said Constance Rattigan.

  “No, thanks. It’s just three hundred yards down the beach. We’re neighbors.”

  “Like hell we are. This place cost two hundred thousand to build in 1920, five million today. What’s your rent? thirty bucks a month?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, neighbor. Hit the sand. Come back some midnight?”

  “Often,” I said.

  “Often.” She took my two hands in hers, which is to say into the hands of the chauffeur and the maid and the movie queen. She laughed, reading my mind. “You think I’m nuts?”

  “I wish the world were like you.”

  She shifted gears to avoid the compliment.

  “And Fannie? Will she live forever?”

  My eyes wet, I nodded.

  She kissed me on both cheeks and pushed. “Get outa here.”

  I jumped from her tiled porch into the sand, ran a step, turned, and said, “Good day, princess.”

  “Shit,” she said, pleased.

  I ran away.

  Nothing much happened that day.

  But that night …

  I woke and glanced at my Mickey Mouse watch, wondering what had pulled me up. I shut my eyes tight and ached my ears, listening.

  Rifle fire. Bang, bong and again bang, bong and again bang, down the coast, from the pier.

  My God, I thought, the pier’s almost empty and the rifle gallery shut, and who could be out there, middle of the night, yanking the trigger and belling the target?

  Bang and bang and the sound of die struck gong. Bang and bong. Again and again. Twelve shots at a time and men twelve more and then twelve more, as if someone had lined up three and then six and then nine rifles and jumped from an empty one to a loaded one without a breath and aimed and fired and fired and fired.

  Madness.

  It had to be. Whoever it was, alone on the pier in the fog, seizing the weapons, firing at Doom.

  Annie Oakley, the rifle lady herself? I wondered.

  Bang. Take that you son-of-a-bitch. Bang. Take that you bastard runaway lover. Bang. Take that you unholy womanizing— freak. Bang!

  Wham and again wham, far off but blowing in the wind.

  So many bullets, I thought, to make something impossible die.

  It went on for twenty minutes.

  When it was over, I could not sleep.

  With three dozen wounds in my chest, I groped over to my typewriter and, eyes shut, typed out all the rifle shots in the dark.

  “Offisa Pup?”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Offisa Pup, this is Krazy Kat”

  “Jesus,” said Crumley. “It’s you. Offisa Pup, eh?”

  “It’s better than Elmo Crumley.”

  “Got me there. And Krazy Kat’s right for you, scribe. How goes the Great American Epic?”

  “How goes the Conan Doyle sequel?”

  “This is embarrassing, but ever since I met you, son, I’m doing four pages a night. It’s like a war: should be outa there by Christmas. Krazy Kats, it turns out, are good influences. That’s the last compliment you get from the offisa. It’s your nickel. Speak.”

  “I got more possibilities for our list of maybe future victims.”

  “Jesus in the lilies, Christ on the cross,” sighed Crumley.

  “Funny how you never notice—”

  “It’s a laugh riot. Proceed.”

  “Shrank still leads the parade. Then Annie Oakley, or whatever her real name is, the line marksman lady. Someone, last night, was shooting on the pier. It had to be her. Who else? I mean, she wouldn’t open up her place, two in the morning, for a stranger, would she?”

  Crumley interrupted.

  “Get her real name. I can’t do anything without her real name.”

  I felt one of my legs being pulled by him and shut up.

  “Cat got your tongue?” said Crumley.

  Silence from me.

  “You still there?” asked Crumley.

  Grim silence.

  “Lazarus,” said Crumley, “damn it to hell, come outa that Christ-awful tomb!”

  I laughed. “Shall I finish the list?”

  “Let me grab my beer. Okay. Shoot.”

  I reeled off six more names, including, though I didn’t really believe it, Shapeshade’s.

  “And maybe,” I finished, and hesitated, “Constance Rattigan.”

  “Rattigan!” yelled Crumley. “What the hell you know about Rattigan? She eats tiger’s balls on toast and can whipsaw sharks two Falls out of three. She’d walk out of Hiroshima with her earrings and eyelashes intact. Annie Oakley, now, no to her, too. She’d rifle someone’s butt off before he—no, only way is some night, on her own, she might toss all her guns off the pier and follow after; that’s in her face. As for Shapeshade, don’t make me laugh. He doesn’t even know the real world exists out here with us grotesque normals. They’ll bury him in his Wurlitzer come 1999. Got any more bright ideas?”

  I swallowed hard and finally decided to at last tell Crumley about the mysterious disappearance of Cal the barber.

  “Mysterious, hell,” said Crumley. “Where you been? The Mad Butcher skedaddled. Piled his tin lizzie with dregs from his shop just the other day, pulled out of the no-parking zone in front of his place, and headed east. Not west, you notice, toward Land’s End, but east. Half the police force saw him make a big U-turn out front the station and didn’t arrest him because he yelled, ‘Autumn leaves, by God, autumn leaves in the Ozarks!’”

  I gave a great trembling sigh of relief, glad for Cal’s survival. I said nothing about Scott Joplin’s missing head, which was probably what drove Cal off and away forever. But Crumley was still talking. “You finished with your super-brand-new list of possibl
e deads?”

  “Well—” lamely.

  “Dip in ocean, then dip in typewriter, says Zen master, makes for full page and happy heart. Listen to the detective advising the genius. The beer is on the ice, so that the pee is in the pot, later. Leave your list at home. So long, Krazy Kat.”

  “Offisa Pup,” I said. “Goodbye.”

  The forty dozen rifle shots from last night drew me. Their echoes would not stop.

  And the sound of more of the pier being pounded and compacted and eaten away drew me, as the sounds of war must draw some.

  The rifle shots, the pier, I thought, as I dipped in the ocean and then dipped in my typewriter, like the good kat Offisa Pup wished me to be, I wonder how many men, or was it just one, Annie Oakley killed last night.

  I wonder, also, I thought, placing six new pages of incredibly brilliant novel in my Talking Box, what new books of drunken doom A. L. Shrank has toadstool-farmed on his catacomb library shelves?

  The Hardy Boys Invite Ptomaine?

  Nancy Drew and the Weltschmerz Kid?

  The Funeral Directors of America Frolic at Atlantic City?

  Don’t go look, I thought. I must, I thought. But don’t laugh when you see the new titles. Shrank might run out and charge you.

  Rifle shots, I thought. Dying pier. A. L. Shrank, Sigmund Freud’s Munchkin son. And now, there, up ahead of me biking on the pier:

  The Beast.

  Or, as I sometimes called him, Erwin Rommel of the Afrika Korps. Or, sometimes, simply:

  Caligula. The Killer.

  His real name was John Wilkes Hopwood.

  I remember reading one of those devastating reviews about him in a small local Hollywood theater some years before:

  John Wilkes Hopwood, the matinee assassin, has done it again to another role. Not only has he torn a passion to tatters, he has, madness maddened, stomped on it, ravened it with his teeth, and hurled it across the footlights at unsuspecting club ladies. The damned fools ate it up!

  I often saw him riding his bright orange Raleigh eight-speed bike along the ocean walk from Venice to Ocean Park and Santa Monica. He was always dressed in a fine, freshly pressed, brown hound’s-tooth English suit with a dark brown Irish cap pulled over his snow-white curls and shading his General Erwin Rommell or, if you prefer, killer hawk’s Conrad-Veidt-about-to-smother-Joan-Crawford-or-Greer-Garson face. His cheeks were burned to a wonderful polished nutmeg color, and I often wondered if the color stopped at his neckline, for I had never seen him out on the sand, stripped. Forever, he cycled up and down between the ocean towns, at liberty, waiting to be summoned by the German General Staff or the club ladies over at the Hollywood Assistance League, whichever came first. When there was a cycle of war films, he worked constantly, for it was rumored he had a full closet of Afrika Korps uniforms and a burial cape for the occasional vampire film.

  As far as I could tell, he had only one casual outfit, that suit. And one pair of shoes, fine English oxblood brogues, highly polished. His bicycle clips, brightly clasping his tweed cuffs, looked to be pure silver from some shop in Beverly Hills. His teeth were always so finely polished, they seemed not his own. His breath, as he pedaled past, was Listerine, just in case he had to take a fast call from Hitler on his way to Playa Del Rey.

  I saw him most often motionless, astride his bike, Sunday afternoons, when Muscle Beach filled up with rippling deltoids and masculine laughter. Hopwood would stand upon the Santa Monica pier, like a commander in the last days of the retreat from El Alamein, depressed at all that sand, delighted with all that flesh.

  He seemed so apart from all of us, gliding by in his Anglo-Byronic-German daydreams …

  I never thought to see him parking his Raleigh bike outside A. L. Shrank’s tarot-card-large-belfry-with-plenty-of-bats-open-at-all-hours shed.

  But park he did, and hesitated outside the door.

  Don’t go in! I thought. No one goes in A. L. Shrank’s unless it’s for poison Medici rings and tombstone phone numbers.

  Erwin Rommel didn’t mind.

  Neither did the Beast, or Caligula.

  Shrank beckoned.

  All three obeyed.

  By the time I got there, the door was shut. On it, for the first time, though it had probably yellowed there for years, was a list, typed with a faded ribbon, of all the folks who had passed through his portals to be psyched back to health.

  H. B. WARNER, WARNER OLAND, WARNER BAXTER, CONRAD NAGEL, VILMA BANKY, ROD LA ROCQUE, BESSIE LOVE, JAMES GLEASON …

  It read like the Actors Directory for 1929.

  But Constance Rattigan was there.

  I didn’t believe that.

  And John Wilkes Hopwood.

  I knew I had to believe that.

  For, as I glanced through the dusty window, where a shade was half-drawn against prying eyes, I saw that someone was indeed on that couch from which stuffing sprang in mad abandon from the burst seams. And the man lying on the couch was the man in the brown tweed suit, eyes shut, doing lines, no doubt from a revised and improved last act of Hamlet.

  Jesus in the lilies, as Crumley had said. Christ fresh to the cross!

  At that moment, intent upon reciting his rosary innards. Hop-wood’s eyes flew open with actor’s intuition.

  His eyes rolled, then his head flicked swiftly to one side. He stared at the window and saw me.

  As did A. L. Shrank, seated nearby, turned away, pad and pencil in hand.

  I stood back, cursed quietly, and walked quickly away.

  In total embarrassment, I walked all the way to the end of the ruined pier, bought six Nestlé’s Crunch bars and two Clark Bars and two Power Houses to devour on the way. Whenever I am very happy or very sad or very embarrassed, I cram my mouth with sweets and Utter the breezeway with discards.

  It was there at the end of the pier in the golden light of late afternoon that Caligula Rommel caught up with me. The destruction workers were gone. The air was silent.

  I heard his bicycle hum and glide just behind me. He didn’t speak at first. He just arrived on foot, the bright silver bike clips around his trim ankles, the Raleigh held in his firm grasp like an insect woman. He stood at the one place on the pier where I had seen him, like a statue of Richard Wagner, watching one of his great choruses come in tides along the shore.

  There were still half a dozen young men playing volleyball below. The thump of the ball and the rifleshots of their laughs were somehow killing the day. Beyond, two weight-lifting finalists were lifting their own worlds into the sky, in hopes of convincing eight or nine young women nearby that a fate worse than death wasn’t so bad after all, and could be had upstairs in the hotdog apartments just across the sand.

  John Wilkes Hopwood surveyed the scene and did not look at me. He was making me sweat and wait, daring me to leave. I had, after all, crossed an invisible sill of his life, half an hour ago. Now, I must pay.

  “Are you following me?” I said at last, and immediately felt a fool.

  Hopwood laughed that famous last-act maniac laugh of his.

  “Dear boy, you’re much too young. You’re the sort I throw back in the sea.”

  God, I thought, what do I say now?

  Hopwood cricked his head stiffly back behind him, pointing his eagle’s profile toward the Santa Monica pier a mile north from here, along the coast.

  “But, if you should ever decide to follow me”—he smiled— “that is where I live. Above the carousel, above the horses.”

  I turned. Far off on that other still vibrant pier was the carousel that had been turning and grinding out its calliope music since I was a kid. Above the big horse race were the Carousel Apartments, a grand eyrie for retired German generals, failed actors, or driven romantics. I had heard that great poets who published small lived there. Novelists of many wits and no reviews lived there. Well-hung artists with unhung paintings lived there. Courtesans of famous film stars who were now prostitutes for spaghetti salesmen lived there. Old English matrons who had once thrived in B
righton and missed the Rocks lived there with stacks of antimacassars and stuffed Pekingese.

  Now it seemed that Bismarck, Thomas Mann, Conrad Veidt, Admiral Doenitz, Erwin Rommel, and Mad Otto of Bavaria lived there.

  I looked at that magnificent eagle profile. Hopwood stiffened with pride at my glance. He scowled at the golden sands and said, quietly, “You think I am crazy, allowing myself the tender mercies of one A. L. Shrank?”

  “Well—”

  “He is a very insightful man, very holistic, very special. And as you know, we actors are the world’s most unsettled people. The future is always uncertain, the phone should ring but never does. We have much time on our hands. So it is either numerology or the tarot cards or astrology or the Eastern meditation up under the great tree at Ojai with Krishnamurti, have you been? Fine! Or Reverend Violet Greener at her Agabeg Temple on Crenshaw? Norvell the futurist? Aimee Semple McPherson, were you ever saved? I was. She laid on the hands, then I laid her. Holy Rollers? The ecstasy. Or the Hall Johnson Choir down in the First Baptist Church Sunday nights. Dark angels. Such glory. Or it is the all-night bridge or the start-at-noon, play-till-dusk bingo with all the ladies with heliotrope hair. Actors go everywhere. If we knew a good eviscerator we would attend. Caesar’s Gut-Readers, Inc. I could make a mint scalpeling doves and fishing out the innards like card-pips where the future lies stinking at noon. I try it all to fill the time. That’s what all actors are, time fillers. Ninety percent of our lives, stage-waits. Meanwhile, we lie down with A. L. Shrank to get it up at Muscle Beach.”

  He had never taken his gaze from the pliant rubber Greek gods who frolicked below, washed by equal parts of salt wind and lust.

  “Have you ever wondered,” he said at last, a faint line of sweat on his upper lip, a faint brim of perspiration along the hairline under his cap, “about vampires who do not appear in mirrors? Well, now, see those glorious young men down there? They appear in all mirrors; but no one else does. Only the minted gods show. And when they stare at themselves, do they ever see anyone else, the girls that they ride like seahorses? I have no such faith. So now”—he went back to his starter subject—“do you understand why you saw me with the wee dark mole A. L. Shrank?”