Death Is a Lonely Business Page 17

  “You’re already regressed—”

  “Please.” I gathered my spit. “I’m going nuts. Regress me. Shove me back!”

  “Holy Moses.” Crumley was on his feet, emptying the coffee and grabbing beer out of the icebox. “Outside the nut farm, where do you want to be sent?”

  “I’ve met the murderer, Crumley. Now I want to meet him again. I tried to ignore him because he was drunk. He was behind me on that last big red train to the sea that night I found the old man dead in the lion cage.”

  “No proof.”

  “Something he said was proof, but I’ve forgotten. If you could ticket me back, let me ride that train again in the storm, and listen for his voice, then I’d know who it is and the killings would stop. Don’t you want them to?”

  “Sure, and after I talk you back with a hypnotic dog act and you bark the results, I go arrest the killer, hmm? Come along now, bad man, my friend the writer heard your voice in a hypnotic séance and that’s more than proof. Here are the handcuffs. Snap ’em on!”

  “The hell with you.” I stood up and jarred my coffee cup down. “I’ll hypnotize myself. That’s what it’s all about, anyway, isn’t it? Autosuggestion? It’s always me that puts me under?”

  “You’re not trained, you don’t know how. Sit down, for Christ’s sake. I’ll help you find a good hypnotist. Hey!” Crumley laughed somewhat crazily. “What about A. L. Shrank, hypnotist?”

  “God.” I shuddered. “Don’t even joke. He’d sink me down with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and I’d never surface again. You got to do it, Elmo.”

  “I got to get you out and me to bed.”

  He led me gently to the door.

  He insisted on driving me home. On the way, looking straight ahead at the dark future, he said, “Don’t worry, kid. Nothing more is going to happen.”

  Crumley was wrong.

  But not immediately, of course.

  I awoke at six in the morning because I thought I heard three dozen rifle shots again.

  But it was only the annihilators at the pier, the workmen dentists, yanking the big teeth. Why, I thought, do destroyers start so early to destroy. And those rifle shots? Probably just their laughter.

  I showered and ran out just in time to meet a fogbank rolling in from Japan.

  The old men from the trolley station were on the beach ahead of me. It was the first time I had seen them since the day their friend Mr. Smith who wrote his name on his bedroom wall had vanished.

  I watched them watching the pier die, and I could feel the timbers fall inside their bodies. The only motion they made was a kind of chewing of their gums, as if they might spit tobacco. Their hands hung down at their sides, twitching. With the pier gone, I knew, they knew, it was only a matter of time before the asphalt machines droned along and tarred over the railroad tracks and someone nailed shut the ticket office and broomed away the last of the confetti. If I had been them, I would have headed for Arizona or some bright place that afternoon. But I wasn’t them. I was just me, half a century younger and with no rust on my knuckles and no bones cracking every time the big pliers out there gave a yank and made an emptiness.

  I went and stood between two of the old men, wanting to say something that counted.

  But all I did was let out a big sigh.

  It was a language they understood.

  Hearing it, they waited a long while.

  And then, they nodded.

  “Well, here’s another fine mess you got me in!”

  My voice, on its way to Mexico City, was Oliver Hardy’s voice.

  “Ollie,” cried Peg, using Stan Laurel’s voice. “Fly down here. Save me from the mummies of Guanajuato!”

  Stan and Ollie. Ollie and Stan. From the start we had called ours the Laurel and Hardy Romance, because we had grown up madly in love with the team, and did a fair job of imitating their voices.

  “Why don’t you do something to help me?” I cried, like Mr. Hardy.

  And Peg as Laurel spluttered back, “Oh, Ollie, I—I mean— it seems—I—”

  And there was silence as we breathed our despair, need, and loving grief back and forth, mile on mile and dollar on Peg’s dear dollar.

  “You can’t afford this, Stan,” I sighed, at last. “And it’s beginning to hurt where aspirins can’t reach. Stan, dear Stanley, so long.”

  “Oil,” she wept. “Dear Ollie—goodbye.”

  As I said …

  Crumley was wrong.

  At exactly one minute after eleven that night, I heard the funeral car pull up in front of my apartment.

  I hadn’t been asleep and I knew the sound of Constance Rattigan’s limousine by the gentle hiss of its arrival and then the bumbling under its breath, waiting for me to stir.

  I got up, asked no questions of God or anyone, and dressed automatically without seeing what I put on. Something had made me reach for my dark pants, a black shirt, and an old blue blazer. Only the Chinese wear white for the dead.

  I held on to the front doorknob for a full minute before I had strength enough to pull the door open and go out. I didn’t climb in the back seat, I climbed up front where Constance was staring straight ahead at the surf rolling white and cold on the shore.

  Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She didn’t say anything, but moved the limousine quietly. Soon we were flying steadily down the middle of Venice Boulevard.

  I was afraid to ask questions because I feared answers.

  About halfway there, Constance said:

  “I had this premonition.”

  That’s all she said. I knew she hadn’t called anyone. She simply had to go see for herself.

  As it turned out, even if she had called someone, it would have been too late.

  We rolled up in front of the tenement at eleven-thirty p.m.

  We sat there and Constance, still staring ahead, the tears streaking down her cheeks, said:

  “God, I feel as though I weigh three-eighty. I can’t move.”

  But we had to, at last.

  Inside the tenement, halfway up the steps, Constance suddenly fell to her knees, shut her eyes, crossed herself, and gasped, “Oh, please, God, please, please let Fannie be alive.”

  I helped her the rest of the way up the stairs, drunk on sadness.

  At the top of the stairs in the dark there was a vast in-sucked draft that pulled at us as we arrived. A thousand miles off, at the far end of night, someone had opened and shut the door on the north side of the tenement. Going out for air? Going out to escape? A shadow moved in a shadow. The cannon bang of the door reached us an instant later. Constance rocked on her heels. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along.

  We moved through weather that got older and colder and darker as we went. I began to run, making strange noises, incantations, with my mouth, to protect Fannie.

  It’s all right, she’ll be there, I thought, making magic prayers, with her phonograph records and Caruso photos and astrology charts and mayonnaise jars and her singing and …

  She was there all right.

  The door hung open on its hinges.

  She was there in the middle of the linoleum in the middle of the room, lying on her back.

  “Fannie!” we both shouted at once.

  Get up! We wanted to say. You can’t breathe lying on your back! You haven’t been to bed in thirty years. You must always sit up, Fannie, always.

  She did not get up. She did not speak. She did not sing.

  She did not even breathe.

  We sank to our knees by her, pleading in whispers, or praying inside. We kneeled there like two worshippers, two penitents, two healers, and put out our hands, as if that would do it. Just by touching we would bring her back to life.

  But Fannie lay there staring at the ceiling as if to say: how curious—what is the ceiling doing there? and why don’t I speak?

  It was very simple and terrible. Fannie had fallen, or been pushed, and could not get up. She had lain there in the middle of
the night until her own weight crushed and smothered her. It would not have taken much to keep her in position so she could not roll over. You didn’t have to use your hands on her, around her neck. Nothing had to be forced. You simply stood over her and made sure that she didn’t roll to get leverage to gasp herself erect. And you watched her for a minute, two minutes, until at last the sounds stopped and the eyes turned to glass.

  Oh Fannie, I groaned, oh Fannie, I mourned, what have you done to yourself?

  There was the faintest whisper.

  My head jerked. I stared.

  Fannie’s crank-up phonograph was still turning, slowly, slowly. But it was still running. Which meant that just five minutes ago, she had cranked it up, put on a record, and …

  Answered the door on darkness.

  The phonograph turntable spun. But there was no record under the needle. Tosca wasn’t there.

  I blinked, and then …

  There was a swift knocking sound.

  Constance was on her feet, choking, running She headed for the door leading out to the balcony overlooking the trash-filled empty lot, with a view of Bunker Hill and the poolhall across the way where laughter came and went all night. Before I could stop her, she was on the screen door to the balcony rail.

  “Constance. No!” I yelled.

  But she was out there only to be sick, bending over and leaning down and letting it all come out, as I much wanted to do. I could only stand and watch and look from her to the great mountain where we foothills had stood a moment before.

  At last Constance stopped.

  I turned, for no reason I could imagine, and went around Fannie and across the room to open a small door. A faint cold light played out over my face.

  “Sweet Christ!” cried Constance, in the door behind me. “What’re you doing?”

  “Fannie told me,” I said, my mouth numb. “Anything happened—look in the icebox.”

  A cold tomb wind blew out around my cheeks.

  “So I’m looking.”

  There was nothing in the icebox, of course.

  Or rather there was too much. Jellies, jams, varieties of mayonnaise, salad dressing, pickles, hot peppers, cheesecake, rolls, white bread, butter, cold cuts—an Arctic delicatessen. The panorama of Fannie’s flesh was there and how it had been planned and steadily built.

  I stared and stared again, trying to see what Fannie wanted me to see. Oh, Christ, I thought, what am I looking for? Is the answer one of these? I almost shoved in to hurl all the jams and jellies to the floor. I had to stop my fist, halfway in.

  It’s not there, or if it is, I can’t see it.

  I gave a terrible death groan and slammed the door.

  The phonograph, with Tosca gone, gave up and quit.

  Someone call the police, I thought. Someone?

  Constance was out on the balcony again.

  Me.

  It was all over by three in the morning. The police had come, and everyone had been questioned and names taken and the whole tenement was awake, as if someone had started a fire in the basement, and when I came out the front of the tenement the morgue van was still parked there with the men trying to figure out how to get Fannie out and down the stairs and away. I hoped they wouldn’t think of the piano box that Fannie had joked about, in the alley. They never did. But Fannie had to stay in her room until dawn, when they brought a bigger van and a larger carrier.

  It was terrible, leaving her up there alone in the night. But the police wouldn’t let me stay, and after all, it was a simple case of death from natural causes.

  As I went down through the levels of the house, the doors were beginning to close and the lights go out, like those nights at the end of the war when the last conga line, exhausted, drained away into the rooms and down into the streets and there was the lonely walk for me up over Bunker Hill and down to the terminal where I would be taken home in thunders.

  I found Constance Rattigan curled up in the back seat of her limousine, lying quietly, staring at nothing. When she heard me open the back door she said, “Get behind the wheel.”

  I climbed up front behind the steering wheel.

  “Take me home,” she said quietly.

  It took me a full moment of sitting there to say finally, “I can’t.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I never learned. There was no reason, anyway.” My tongue moved like lead between my lips. “Since when can writers afford cars?”

  “Jesus.” Constance managed to prop herself up and get out, like someone with a hangover. She got out and came around walking slowly and blindly and waved. “Get over.”

  Somehow she started the car. This time we drove at about ten miles an hour, as if there were a fog so you could only see ten feet ahead.

  We made it as far as the Ambassador Hotel. She turned in there and drove up just as the last of a Saturday night party came out with balloons and funny hats. The Coconut Grove was putting out its lights above us. I saw some musicians hurrying away with their instruments.

  Everyone knew Constance. We signed in and had a bungalow on the side of the hotel in a few minutes. We had no luggage but no one seemed to mind. The bellboy who took us through the garden to our place kept looking at Constance as if maybe he should carry her. When we were in the room, Constance said, “Would a fifty-dollar tip find the key and unlock the gate to let us in the swimming pool around back?”

  “It would go a long way toward finding the key,” the bellboy said. “But a swim, this time of night—?”

  “It’s my hour,” said Constance.

  Five minutes later the lights came on in the pool and I sat there and watched Constance dive in and swim twenty laps, on occasion swimming underwater from one end to the other without coming up for air.

  When she came out, ten minutes later, she was gasping and red-faced and I cloaked her in a big towel and held her.

  “When do you start crying?” I said, at last.

  “Dummy,” she said. “I just did. If you can’t do it in the ocean, a pool’s fine. If you don’t have a pool, hit the shower. You can scream and yell and sob all you want, and it doesn’t bother anyone, the world never hears. Ever think of that?”

  “I never thought,” said I, in awe.

  At four o’clock in the morning, Constance found me in our bungalow bathroom, standing and staring at the shower.

  “Hit it,” she said, gently. “Go on. Give it a try.”

  I got in and turned the water on, hard.

  At eleven in the morning, we motored through Venice and looked at the canals with a thin layer of green slime on their surface, and passed the half-torn-down pier and looked at some gulls soaring in the fog up there, and no sun yet, and the surf so quiet it was like muffled black drums.

  “Screw this,” said Constance. “Flip a nickel. Heads we go north to Santa Barbara. Tails, south to Tijuana.”

  “I don’t have a nickel,” I said.

  “Christ.” Constance grubbed in her purse and took out a quarter and tossed it in the air. ’Tails!”

  We were in Laguna by noon, no thanks to the highway patrol that somehow missed us.

  We sat out in the open air on a cliff overlooking the beach at Victor Hugo’s and had double margaritas.

  “You ever see Now, Voyager?”

  “Ten times,” I said.

  “This is where Bette Davis and Paul Henried sat having a love lunch early in the film. This was the location, back in the early Forties. You’re sitting in the very chair where Henried put his behind.”

  We were in San Diego by three and outside the bullring in Tijuana just at the hour of four.

  “Think you can stand this?” asked Constance.

  “I can only try,” I said.

  We made it through the third bull and came out into the late-afternoon light and had two more margaritas and a good Mexican dinner before we went north and drove out onto the island and sat in the sunset at
the Hotel del Coronado. We didn’t say anything, but just watched the sun go down, lighting the old Victorian towers and fresh-painted white sidings of the hotel with pink color.

  Along the way home we swam in the surf at Del Mar, wordless and, from time to time, hand in hand.

  At midnight we were in front of Crumley’s jungle compound.

  “Many me,” said Constance.

  “Next time I live,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, that’s not bad. Tomorrow.”

  When she was gone I walked up the jungle path.

  “Where have you been?” said Crumley, in the door.

  “Uncle Wiggily says go back three hops,” I said.

  “The Skeezix and the Pipsisewah say come in,” said Crumley.

  The something cold in my hand was a beer.

  “Lord,” he said, “you look terrible. Come here.”

  He gave me a hug. I didn’t think a man like Crumley ever hugged anyone, not even a woman.

  “Be careful,” I said, “I’m made out of glass.”

  “I heard this morning, friend of mine down in Central. I’m sorry, kid. I know she was a close friend. You got that list with you?”

  We were out in the jungle with just the crickets sounding and Segovia, lost inside the house, playing a lament for some day a long time past when the sun stayed up for forty-eight hours in Seville.

  I found my dumb list crumpled in my pocket and handed it over. “How come you want to see?”

  “All of a sudden, I don’t know,” said Crumley. “You made me curious”

  He sat down and began to read:

  Old man in lion cage. Killed. Weapon unknown.

  Canaries-for-sale lady. Frightened.

  Pietro Masinello. In jail.

  Jimmy. Drowned in bathtub.

  Sam. Dead from alcohol given him by someone.

  Fannie.

  With an addition made in the last few hours.

  Smothered.

  Other new and possible victims:

  Henry, the blind man.

  Annie Oakley, the rifle lady.