Death Is a Lonely Business Page 16

  “Well, did you, or didn’t you?” I yelled, leaning toward her.

  “Don’t you love me any more?”

  “Love you, hell, I’m trying to get you out of here and you won’t come. You accuse me of poisoning the toilets, and now tell me to look in iceboxes. Jesus God, Fannie.”

  “Now the lieutenant is mad with Butterfly.” But her eyes were starting to well over.

  I couldn’t stand any more of that.

  I opened the door.

  Mrs. Gutierrez had been standing there a long while, I was sure, a plate of hot tacos in her hands, always the diplomat, waiting.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, Fannie,” I said.

  “Of course you will, and Fannie will be alive!”

  I wonder, I thought, if I shut my eyes and pretend to be blind …

  Can I find Henry’s room?

  I tapped on Henry’s door.

  “Who that?” Henry said, locked away.

  “Who dat say who dat?” I said.

  “Who dat say who dat say who dat?” he said, and had to laugh. Then he remembered he was in pain. “It’s you.”

  “Henry, let me in.”

  “I’m okay, just fell downstairs is all, just almost got destroyed is all, just let me rest here with the door locked, I’ll be out tomorrow, you’re a good boy to worry.”

  “What happened, Henry?” I asked the locked door.

  Henry came closer. I felt he was leaning against it, like someone talking through a confessional lattice.

  “He tripped me.”

  A rabbit ran around in my chest and turned into a big rat that kept right on running.

  “Who, Henry?”

  “Him. Son-of-a-bitch tripped me.”

  “Did he say anything, you sure he was there?”

  “How do I know the upstairs hall light is on? Me? I feel. Heat. The hall was terrible warm where he was. And he was breathing, of course. I heard him sucking away at the air and blowing out nice and gentle where he hid. He didn’t say nothing as I went by, but I heard his heart, too, wham, wham, or maybe it was mine. I figured to sneak by so he can’t see me, blind man figures that if he’s in the dark, why not everyone else. And next thing you know—bam! I’m at the bottom of the stairs and don’t know how I got there. I started yelling for Jimmy and Sam and Pietro, then I said damn fool to myself, they’re gone and you, too, if you don’t ask for someone else. I started naming names, top speed, doors popped all around the house, and while they was popping, he popped out. Sounded almost barefoot out the door. Smelled his breath.”

  I swallowed and leaned on the door. “What was it like?”

  “Let me think and tell. Henry’s going to bed now. I’m sure glad I’m blind. Hate to have seen myself going down stairs like a bag of laundry. Night.”

  “Goodnight, Henry,” I said.

  And turned just as the big steamboat of a tenement house rounded a bend of river wind in the dark. I felt I was back at the surf in Mr. Shapeshade’s movie house at one in the morning, with the tide glutting and shaking the timbers under the seats, and the big silver-and-black images gliding on the screen. The whole tenement shivered. The cinema was one thing. The trouble with this big old twilight place was the shadows had come off the screen and waited by stairwells and hid in bathrooms and unscrewed lightbulbs some nights so everyone groped, blind as Henry, to find their way out.

  I did just that. At the top of the stairs, I froze. I heard breath churning the air ahead of me. But it was only the echo of my own sucks and swallows hitting the wall and bouncing back to feel at my face.

  For Christ’s sake, I thought, don’t trip yourself, going down.

  The chauffeur-driven 1928 Duesenberg limousine was waiting for me when I came out of Fannie’s. When the door slammed, we were off and halfway to Venice when the chauffeur up front took off his cap and let his hair down and became …

  Rattigan the Interrogator.

  “Well?” she said coldly. “Is she or isn’t she upset?”

  “She is damn well upset but I didn’t upset her.”

  “No?”

  “No, damn it, now just pull up at the next corner and let me the damn hell out!”

  “For a bashful boy from northern Illinois, you got some language, Mr. Hemingway.”

  “Well, hell, Miss Rattigan!”

  That did it. I saw her shoulders slump a little. She was losing me, if she wasn’t careful, and knew it.

  “Constance,” she suggested, quieter.

  “Constance,” I said. “It’s not my fault people drown in bathtubs and drink too much or fall downstairs or get taken away by the police. Why didn’t you come inside just now? You’re Fannie’s old, old friend.”

  “I was afraid that seeing you and me together would overload and the top of her head fly off and we would never be able to get it back on.”

  She let the limousine go from a rather hysterical seventy down to a nervous sixty or sixty-two. But she had her claws on the wheel as if it were my shoulders and she was shaking me. I said, “You’d better get her out of there, once and for all. She won’t sleep for a week now and that might loll her, just exhaustion. You can’t feed a soul on mayonnaise forever.”

  Constance slowed the limo to fifty-five.

  “She give you a rough time?”

  “Only called me Death’s Friend, like you. I seem to be everyone’s goat, handing out bubonic fleas. Whatever is in the tenement is there all right, but I’m not the carrier. On top of which, Fannie has done something stupid.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, she won’t tell me. She’s put out with herself. Maybe you can worm it out of her. I got a terrible feeling Fannie brought all this on herself.”

  “How?”

  The limousine slowed to forty. Constance was watching me in the rearview mirror. I licked my lips.

  “I can only guess. Something in her icebox, she said. If anything happened to her, she said, look in the icebox. God, how stupid! Maybe you can go back, later tonight on your own and look in the damn icebox and figure out how and why and what it is that Fannie has invited into the tenement that is scaring the hell out of her.”

  “Jesus at midnight,” murmured Constance, shutting her eyes. “Mary at dawn.”

  “Constance!” I yelled.

  For we had just gone through a red light, blind.

  Luckily, God was there, and paved the way.

  She parked in front of my apartment and she got out while I unlocked the door and she stuck her head in.

  “So this is where all the genius happens, huh?”

  “A little piece of Mars on earth.”

  “Is that Cal’s piano there? I heard about the music critics who tried to burn it once. Then there were the customers who mobbed the shop one day, yelling and showing their funny hair.”

  “Cal’s all right,” I said.

  “Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

  “He tried.”

  “Just on one side of you. Remind me, next time you’re over, my dad did some barbering, too. Taught me. Why are we standing here in the doorway? Afraid the neighbors will talk if you— hell. There you go again. No matter what I say, it seems to be the truth. You’re the genuine article, aren’t you? I haven’t seen a bashful man since I turned twelve.”

  She stuck her head further in.

  “God, all the junk. Don’t you ever pick up? What’s this, reading ten books at a time, half of them comics? Is that a Buck Rogers disintegrator there by your typewriter? Did you send away box tops?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “What a dump,” she crowed, and meant it for a compliment.

  “All that I have is yours.”

  “That bed isn’t even big enough for club sandwich sex.”

  “One partner always has to stay on the floor.”

  “Jesus, what year is that typewriter you’re using?”

  “1935 Underwood Standard, old but great.”

  “Just like me, huh, kid? You going to invite the
ancient celebrity in and unscrew her earrings?”

  “You’ve got to go back and look in Fannie’s icebox, remember? Besides, if you slept over tonight, spoons.”

  “Plenty of cutlery, but no fork?”

  “No fork, Constance.”

  “The memory of your mended underwear is devastating.”

  “I’m no boy David.”

  “Hell, you’re not even Ralph. Goodnight, kid. It’s me for Fannie’s icebox. Thanks!”

  She gave me a kiss that burst my eardrums and drove away.

  Reeling with it, I somehow made it to bed.

  Which I shouldn’t have done.

  Because then I had the Dream.

  Every night the small rainfall came outside my door, stayed a moment, whispered, and went away. I was afraid to go look. Afraid I might find Crumley standing there, drenched, with fiery eyes. Or Shapeshade, flickering and moving in jerks, like an old film, seaweed hung from his eyebrows and nose....

  Every night I waited, the rain stopped, I slept.

  And then came the Dream.

  I was a writer in a small, green town in northern Illinois, and seated in a barber chair like Cal’s chair in his empty shop. Then someone rushed in with a telegram that announced I had just made a movie sale for one hundred thousand dollars!

  In the chair, yelling with happiness, waving the telegram, I saw the faces of all the men and boys, with the barber, turn to glaciers, turn to permafrost, and when they did pretend at smiles of congratulation their teeth were icicles.

  Suddenly I was the outsider. The wind from their mouths blew cold on me. I had changed forever. I could not be forgiven.

  The barber finished my haircut much too quickly, as if I were untouchable, and I went home with my telegram gripped in my sweating hands.

  Late that night, from the edge of the woods not far from my house, in that small town, I heard a monster crying beyond the forest.

  I sat up in bed, with crystals of cold frost skinning my body. The monster roared, coming nearer. I opened my eyes to hear better. I gaped my mouth to relax my ears. The monster shrieked closer, half through the forest now, thrashing and plunging, crushing the wildflowers, frightening rabbits and clouds of birds that rose screaming to the stars.

  I could not move or scream myself. I felt the blood drain from my face. I saw the celebratory telegram on the bureau nearby. The monster shouted a terrible cry of death and plunged again, as if chopping trees along the way with its horrible scimitar teeth.

  I leaped from bed, seized the telegram, ran to the front door, threw it wide. The monster was almost out of the forest. It brayed, it shrieked, it knocked the night winds with threats.

  I tore the telegram into a dozen pieces and threw them out over the lawn and shouted after them.

  “The answer is no! Keep your money! Keep your fame! I’m staying here! I won’t go! No,” and again, “No!” and a final, despairing, “No!”

  The last cry died in the monster dinosaur’s throat. There was a dreadful moment of silence.

  The moon slid behind a cloud.

  I waited, with the sweat freezing over my face.

  The monster sucked in a breath, exhaled, then turned and lumbered away, back through the forest, fading, at last gone, into oblivion. The pieces of telegram blew like moth wings on the lawn. I shut and locked the screen and went, mourning with relief, to bed. Just before dawn, I slept.

  Now, in bed in Venice, waked from that dream, I went to my front door and looked out at the canals. What could I shout to the dark water, to the fog, to the ocean on the shore? Who would hear, what monster might recognize my mea culpa or my great refusal or my protest of innocence or my argument for my goodness and a genius as yet unspent?

  Go away! could I cry? I am guilty of nothing. I must not die. And, let the others alone, for God’s sake. Could I say or shout that?

  I opened my mouth to try. But my mouth was caked with dust that had somehow gathered in the dark.

  I could only put one hand out in a gesture, a begging, an empty pantomime. Please, I thought.

  “Please,” I whispered. Then shut the door.

  At which point, the telephone across the street in my special phone booth rang.

  I won’t answer, I thought. It’s him. The Ice Man.

  The phone rang.

  It’s Peg.

  The phone rang.

  It’s him.

  “Shut up!” I shrieked.

  The phone stopped.

  My weight collapsed me into bed.

  Crumley stood in his door blinking.

  “For God’s sake, you know what time it is?”

  We stood there watching each other, like boxers who have knocked each other silly and don’t know where to lie down.

  I couldn’t think of what to say so I said, “I am most dreadfully attended.”

  “That’s the password. Shakespeare. Come.”

  He led me through the house to where coffee, a lot of it in a big pot, was cooking on the stove.

  “I been working late on my masterpiece.” Crumley nodded toward his bedroom typewriter. A long yellow page, like the tongue of the Muse, was hanging out of it. “I use legal paper, get more on it. I suppose I figure if I come to the end of a regular-sized page I won’t go on. Jesus, you look lousy. Bad dreams?”

  “The worst.” I told him about the barber shop, the hundred-thousand-dollar movie sale, the monster in the night, my shouts, and the great beast moaning away gone and me alive, forever.

  “Jesus.” Crumley poured two big cups of something so thick it was bubbling lava. “You even dream better than I do!”

  “What’s the dream mean? We can never win, ever? If I stay poor and don’t ever publish a book, I lose. But if I sell and publish and have money in the bank, do I lose, too? Do people hate you? Will friends forgive you? You’re older, Crumley, tell me. Why does the beast in the dream come to kill me? Why do I have to give back the money? What’s it all about?”

  “Hell,” snorted Crumley. “I’m no psychiatrist.”

  “Would A. L. Shrank know?”

  “With finger-painting and stool-smearing? Naw. You going to write that dream? You always advise others—”

  “When I calm down. Walking over here, a few minutes ago, I remembered my doctor once offering to tour me through the autopsy-dissection rooms. Thank God, I said no. Then I really would have been dreadfully attended. I’m overworked now. How do I clean out the lion cage in my head? How do I smooth the old canary lady’s bedsheets? How do I coax Cal the barber back from Joplin? How do I protect Fannie, across town tonight and no weapons?”

  “Drink your coffee,” advised Crumley.

  I grubbed in my pocket and took out the picture of Cal with Scott Joplin except Joplin’s head was still missing. I told Crumley where I had found it.

  “Someone stole the head off this picture. When Cal saw that, he knew someone was on to him, the jig was up, and got out of town.”

  “That’s not murder,” said Crumley.

  “Same as,” I said.

  “Same as pigs flying and turkeys getting carbuncles tap-dancing. Next case, as they say in court.”

  “Someone gave Sam too much booze and killed him. Someone turned Jimmy over in the bathtub to drown. Someone called the police on Pietro and he was hauled away and that will finish him. Someone stood over the canary lady and very simply scared her to death. Someone shoved that old man into the lion cage.”

  “Got some further coroner’s reports on him,” said Crumley. “Blood was full of gin.”

  “Right. Someone soused him, knocked him on the head, pulled him into the canal, already dead, shoved him behind bars, came out, and walked to his car or his apartment somewhere in Venice, all wet, but who would notice a wet man, no umbrella, in a storm?”

  “Shoat. No, let me use a dirtier word, shirt. You couldn’t buy a judge doughnuts and Java with this garage sale of yours, buster. People die. Accidents happen. Motive, damn it, motive. All you got is that rummy song, last nigh
t I saw upon the stair, a little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. My God, I wish he’d go away! Think. If this so-called killer exists, there’s only one person we know who’s been around it all. You.”

  “Me? You don’t think—”

  “No, and calm down. Avert those big pink rabbity eyes. Jesus, let me go find something.”

  Crumley walked over to a bookshelf on one side of his kitchen (there were books in every room of his house) and grabbed down a thick volume.

  He tossed Shakespeare’s Collected Plays on the kitchen table.

  “Meaningless malignity,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Shakespeare’s full of it, you’re full of it, me, everyone. Meaningless malignity. Don’t that have a ring? It means someone running around doing lousy things, a bastard, for no reason. Or none we can figure.”

  “People don’t run around being sons-of-bitches for no reason.”

  “God.” Crumley snorted gently. “You’re naive. Half the cases we handle over at the station are guys gunning red lights to kill pedestrians, or beating up their wives, or shooting friends, for reasons they can’t recall. The motives are there, sure, but buried so deep it would take nitro to blast them out. And if there is a guy like the one you’re trying to find with your beer reason and whiskey logic, there’s no way to find him. No motives, no root systems, no clues. He’s walking about scot-free and unencumbered unless you can connect the anklebone to the legbone to the kneebone to the thighbone.”

  Crumley, looking happy, sat down, poured more coffee.

  “Ever stop to think,” he said, “there are no toilets in graveyards?”

  My jaw dropped. “Boy! I never thought of that! No need for restrooms out among the tombstones. Unless! Unless you’re writing an Edgar Allan Poe tale and a corpse gets up at midnight and has to go.”

  “You going to write that? Jesus, here I am, giving away ideas.”

  “Crumley.”

  “Here it comes,” he sighed, pushing his chair back.

  “You believe in hypnotism? Mind regression?”